Who would have thought there would be so much trouble just from rolling up the rim of a coffee cup? But now a national coffee chain’s simple game is “brewing” up controversy.

Tim Hortons introduced the “Roll Up the Rim to Win” game several years ago. At that time it didn’t seem that there was much of a coffee craze. Many people would make their morning coffee at home, pour it into a travel mug and head into work. Then it became easier just to stop at a drive-thru on the way and order at a window then be on your way to the office.

But now it’s trendy to stop in for one of those new beverages like a double-double-bubble-rumble-something-or-other. So when co-workers find out you’re heading over to “Timmys”, many times you end up picking up orders for the entire office.

The debate comes as the question of cup ownership plays out in Quebec as a schoolgirl found a discarded cup in the garbage and was unable to roll the rim and asked a friend for help. The cup was a winner. The question remains -- if a prize is won, who should it be awarded to? Is it the person who paid for the cup? Is it the person who drank the coffee? Is it the person who picked through the garbage to retrieve the cup? Or is it the roller of the rim?

Maybe we should wait for others to come forward and claim that they drank the coffee and threw out the cup, therefore it is theirs. We can send it to a lab for DNA testing to find out who actually used it. So instead of just having two parties battling for the prize we now make it like a workplace lottery win where anybody and everybody believes they get a cut because they feel they were some how involved in the big win.

It’s ridiculous to think that a little paper cup, that is quite often just thrown on the ground to create garbage in the streets, is now all of a sudden hot property when something free is involved. When we see anything else littering the street do we all of a sudden rush to claim pieces of garbage? We don’t have people fighting over pieces of trash saying, “No, this gum wrapper is mine.” “No, I want it.”

If people have to start claiming ownership of a cup perhaps Tim Hortons should make little “Hello, I belong to ______” labels on them so there aren’t any more heated arguments over garbage.

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