I was standing quite alone on an empty dirt road. I'd just biked up three of the hardest hills of my life, and was about halfway through the 30-mile route of Brattleboro, Vermont's 2018 Tour de Heifer.
I needed an iced coffee and didn't have much time, so I rolled up to the McDonald's drive-through and asked the robot-speaker-thingy for a small, with Splenda on the side. After a pause, a bored, distorted voice said, "Medium iced coffee. Anything else?"