The walk takes him about twenty minutes. The suburban streets are just hot enough to stir up some pollen and irritate his eyes, but not to a level where it is unbearable. He walks through the side door to his house, stepping over the tube that vents the tumble dryer. The fact that the door is open would suggest that either someone is already home or that his residence is being burgled by someone both skillful enough to pick the lock, and sloppy/well armed enough to leave it wide open. After dumping his rucksack in the living room he backtracks to the fridge and picks out a mini can of Coke. The decompression as it opens is music to the young man's ears and the first sip is like the elixir of life itself.
This is surely the power of branding at work; during the final steps of his walk he had been pondering the differences between Microsoft and Coca-Cola as companies. Both are basically in the same league of creating a world dominating brand, but for some reason he feels much less dislike for Coca-Cola. He thinks that maybe this is because he feels trapped in his Microsoft bubble, and wishes he had made the time to learn how to use MacOS, Linux and whatnot [note to self: is whatnot a good name for an OS? It'll probably sound worse when I read this back later.] CC on the other hand? Well there's always Pepsi... with their puny three colour advertising, inferior to the minimalism of Coke's Red and White. (Microsoft = Four. FOUR! The brutes.) Not to mention the variety of other beverages he consumes on a regular basis, both soft and alcoholic, ranging from the ales of local micro-breweries to mass-produced pop.
And so it was a combination of the heat and this train of thought that inevitably led to the selection of the drink. Now there's about three-quarters of an hour to use (he tries to avoid thinking of it as "killing" time) before going out.
