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.)
Back in 1997, William Topley went solo and came out with a really good album that nobody bought called “Black River”.
The song that I remember from it and have had bumping around in my head for a week or two is “I Don’t Wanna Go Uptown“.
I don’t wanna go uptown baby

Any friends I’ve got are downtown anywayReport
That’s hilarious about your coworker and I respect her resistance to the arbitrary demands of your corporate overlords.
My weekend, as usual this time of year, is going to be wall to wall children’s sports. Hopefully I don’t die of allergies. Everything around here is covered in a yellowish green and I need Zyrtec just to keep my eyes open.
However I did do something weekend-y last night and saw the Pink Floyd Live at Pompeii currently being screened at various imax theaters across the country. I have to say it was awesome and totally worth the price of admission. Sound quality was just incredible. It is the way Pink Floyd is meant to be listened to so any fans should check it out. Also depending on legal status in your state a little extra tap from your local dispensary will make it even cooler, not that I personally would know anything about that.Report
First, :amusement:, that’s my cat. It’s like I sent you a photo and you put it up there. Handsome fellow.
2nd, Coffee is evil. I love it, but it’s evil none the less.
I used to get migraine headaches every few months. They were bad enough that I’d also get nausea and then go through caffeine withdrawal as well as just being sick. Then I gave up all forms of caffeine and the migraines went away.
And we have an anima club meeting this weekend.Report
About 10-days ago my oldest son got engaged; this weekend they are hosting their engagement party at our property. He’s the oldest from a ‘big’ family and she’s the second youngest from a ‘large’ family… so we’re expecting about 60 folks. Owing to the family dynamics, she has about a dozen nieces and nephews who are in the same age-range as my youngest son (10)… he’s planning an epic airsoft game in the woods.
We opened the pool a little early to take pressure off our (smallish) house; but the pool has been acting all temperamental, so I’ve had to putter heavily to figure out what’s wrong. Might be the DE filter (pulled apart & cleaned 2x), might be a suction side blockage (pushed water through with bladder), might be an aging pump (disassembled, but nothing)… so I’m running out of ideas.
Unlike my eldest daughter who got married in the big-city (well, DC) in Jan… these two want to get married on the property in October. So we get to experience the wedding planning sensation 2x in a year. One thing I’m grateful to younger-self is starting a UGM account for each kid and throwing excess funds into them for the past 20+ years. This way we don’t guarantee whatever wedding we want, we tell them that their budget from us is $x (about 1/2 what we’ve saved – without telling them what we’ve saved). Then as a wedding gift we give them 2x and either they are thrilled with the windfall or relieved that their wedding debt less than they thought. I suspect my son and his wife will be the former, while my daughter was definitely the latter.
The nice thing about setting up funds that are ‘out of circulation’ for everyday expenses is that they don’t get eaten up by $600 coffee machines. It’s not fool-proof as our coffee machine costs $900, but it does temper one’s expectations for replacing it with the latest new coffee machine – which I’ve got my eye on.Report
Congrats on achieving final completion of another of the offspring.
Also you better start stocking up on fireworks. No backyard wedding is complete without them, and the small element of danger they add to the occasion.Report
That’s a good idea. We have some folks in the community who do this — will bring it up to the planning committee.Report
Congrats on the expansion of your fam!
My husband and I got married in my mothers gardens (she’s a retired landscaper so they were very beautiful). I mostly just hit under the table and wrote checks while he and she planned it but despite my complaining it ended up being quite economical. Though same sex weddings don’t, I gather, have quite the same implicit expectations and associated expenses that straight ones do. Anyhow, I think marriages on the property is definitely the way to go.Report
Thanks. I wish we had gardens! or a landscaper!… mostly this will have the benefit of the flexibility for arrangements and expanse of pastures: no constraints on setting-up and no constraints on shutting down.
On expectations, my wife and I have both encouraged the children to go simple and keep the money we’ve saved for them. A morning wedding with a lovely brunch! We watched All Creatures Great and Small and retro-coveted their wedding for our own (sort of). My wife blames pintrest for some of the extravagances of my daughter’s wedding… nevertheless, the simple magnitude of the families involved will drive a lot of decisions for this one.Report
I always thought the wedding in It’s a Wonderful Life was the way to go. At your parents’ home, with an inebriated uncle stumbling out at the end.Report
Perfection.Report
Truth be told we got infinitely more wedding than the modest expenses we paid for thanks to my mothers social connections and her gardening obsession resulting in her having an acre of (somewhat jungle like in places) gardens to play in. Though ours was a far smaller affair, maybe 30 guests total?
Weddings are a funny business and I have a (somewhat to very chauvinistic) impression that women being involved hikes the cost. The one lesbian wedding we went to was an extravaganza fit to ransom the moon itself.Report
Heh, weddings without the bride would be much more sensible… waaaait a minute.Report
You wouldn’t believe some of the shoe-string weddings without a bride I’ve been to.Report
Congrats. My song got married a couple weeks ago, and it’s still very surreal (made moreso by the fact that neither of his parents has ever married).Report
Congrats! Contrarians in every generation…Report
Weddings abound! I have one getting married this fall. Congratulations.Report
Congratulations… we’re going to need an OT sidebar for old-people stuff.Report
I’m at that in-between point. My children are past the marrying stage, and my granddaughters haven’t got there yet.Report
I envy the grandchildren… it is a gift to see your children’s children.Report
I fully support your coworker in her act of defiance against this random act of management. Reminds me of a coder I worked with at a previous job who sat in the coldest cubicle in the building. He was, of course, forbidden from plugging any kind of heater in, so instead he requested a machine which would run Solaris so he could write code at his desk instead of having to go into the lab. These things were big, beefy SunBlade 2000’s and the put out TONS of heat. I don’t know that he ever actually used it to write any code ..Report