Weekend Plans Post: Caffeine Rituals

I work with a crazy coffee person. I’m sure you know the type: She brought in a $600 machine in order to make her own coffee at work and when you ask about it, she explains that, no, the expensive machine is still at home. She and I discussed the nuances of coffee and I told the story about the saffron/cinnamon/cardamon coffee I had in Qatar and, well, it came out that I’m not really a coffee guy, at the end of the day, but I’d love to try the coffee from the expensive machine, if she were able to make an extra cup.

So, the next day, she brought in a 90ml vial full of (cold) coffee and explained to me that I could microwave it, if I wanted. I explained that I wanted the flavor, not the experience and tasted the coffee and… yeah. It was really good. Really strong but there were a lot of notes under it.

I thanked her profusely and said that it was the best coffee I’d had since the Middle East (and, yeah, it was) and gave it very little thought since.

Well… Management sent out an Official Email. Apparently somebody talked to somebody talked to somebody else and eventually a vice-president got convinced that a cubicle coffee machine was a liquid/electricity hazard and wanted all of the individual coffee machines (including the Keurigs!) removed from the building.

Well, news travels fast and the VP had it explained to him that “our coffee machines are substandard according to the engineers who do stuff like write the code and consider the $600 coffee maker the cheap one.”

So they bought an expensive coffee machine. It’s a similar one to the one that they have at the car dealership that charges $4 for coffee. It tastes like coffee to me, but many of my co-workers who used the drip machines expressed delight at the quality of the new thingamabob.

My coffee engineer, however, sniffed in disdain. She still has the $600 machine in her cube area, on top of a file cabinet. “They can tell me to get rid of it in person”, she told me.

I told her that she rocked and she snorted. We’ll see if the machine is still there at the end of the summer, I guess.

This weekend will be a somewhat fullish one. I’ve got to hit up Costco because I ran out of aluminum foil and, lemme tell ya, there are so many things that I’m unable to make if I don’t have aluminum foil. No more stuff in the oven, for one. No more baked potatoes. No more baked french fries. No more baked anything, for that matter. On top of that, if I need to wrap a present, there’s nothing in the house! So I have to go to Costco and pick up a restaurant pack of foil and probably some other stuff too. Cheese. That sort of thing. Saturday is game night and Sunday is dinner with Mom.

A good capstone to a mostly cruddy week.

So… what’s on your docket?

(Featured image is “Post Nail-clip Reward”. Photo taken by Maribou.)