Oh, my cups and saucers

On my first day at work here, ten months ago, my boss was showing me around the floor and announced, “[Employer] doesn’t provide tea and coffee. Some people go in on a coffee club. I just go outside when I need a fix.”

Well, I’ve been working in the tech field for so long that it never occurred to me that coffee would even be a thing. I mean, yeah—I can see that sodas, snacks and Friday afternoon beer and wine might not be on offer, but at every company I’ve worked at since the early 90s, coffee is basically table stakes.

And in the Valley They Call Silicon, they’ve moved well beyond the coffee pot stage: if it’s not outright espresso, they’re individual-serve pod-based machines. Some even grind the beans for each cup. I was disagreeably surprised to find that Cisco Systems is still really old-style, with coffee pots (and the cheapest industrially-extruded bottom-of-the-barrel no-name coffee on the planet) that seem to turn their contents to sludge within the first 20 minutes of sitting there. (I’m betting that the executive offices don’t sport this crap, but it’s apparently good enough for all the worker bees still left after multiple years of layoffs.)

So I was shocked. And I marked my boss up as somewhat cagy, because at no time in the interview process was this mentioned, and he was an employee of AOL in its high-flying days, so he’s well aware of the delta. He knew he was concealing pertinent information.

Well, after trying it on my own for a few months, spending $2.50 for a cup at the salad place on my way into work, I finally joined the Coffeebot club on my floor. It’s $5 a month. The coffee quality is on the lines of Cisco, tbh; I mean—how is it even possible to buy stuff this bad in an open, competitive marketplace?

(In fairness, I seem to be the only person in the club who doesn’t drown their java in cream and sugar. So I may be the only person who actually tastes the crap.)

Way back in the last century, I worked for an engineering company—one of the three largest in the world, all headquartered in the Pasadena area. Evidently having the employer supply coffee was a big deal (it was one of my first jobs, so I didn’t have any point of reference). There were machines, pots, packets of coffee, and ancillary stuff like sugar, sweetener and that ground-up Styrofoam fake cream-like product.

(I’ve never used cream, real or artificial, in coffee. But if I had done, a demonstration by a colleague at a much later job, on the other coast, in which he set that stuff alight, would have weaned me off of it. If you can use a powdered fake cream to break into a safe, I’m betting that you don’t really want to be drinking it.)

The thing about this setup was that the coffee machines weren’t hooked up to water lines, so if you wanted to make a pot, you had to rinse out the empty one, fill it with water and pour into the well of the machine. Then you did the usual: opened the coffee packet, emptied the contents into the filter, put the filter in the basket and hit start.

Well, you would not believe what a rift this caused in The Force. As I mentioned, this was one of the Big Three engineering companies, which is to say that it was 98% male, with women almost exclusively in support roles. There was one female engineer I worked with, I was a tech writer, and there was a woman in marketing. All the others were pretty much admins.

So, when the guys wanted coffee, they’d barrel into the kitchenettes and come to a halt when they discovered that there was only a splash left in the bottom of the pot. Seriously—at least once a week I’d come across the pathetic sight of a middle-aged white guy in short sleeved white shirt and a pocket protector standing in front of the machine gazing dejectedly at the empty (or as good as) pot. If a woman walked into the space, his face would light up, and he’d hand her the pot and wait.

No, I am not making that up.

Well, I’ve noticed that, while not quite as dire as those old days at Jacobs, there’s still a custom whereby people will happily take the last viable cup of coffee and walk away without making a replacement pot. Because, in this case, that would entail emptying and rinsing the coffee basket, scooping grounds from the canister right next to the machine into it, rinsing out the pot and filling it with filtered water, pouring it into the well, and hitting Brew.

You can see where this would constitute an undue burden.

(And, as the first person to make coffee in the morning, let me just say that walking in there at 0630 and finding the last sludge in the bottom of the pot still there, along with the 17-hour-old used grounds in the basket for me to empty and clean is not my idea of a morning wake-me-up.)

Okay, but that’s not even the really interesting part. Apparently the supply of coffee has been consumed at an inordinate rate. First there were time/date stamps on the Coffeebot white board, then injunctions to the effect that people are not supposed to eat the coffee. Then the canister was marked at a level to signify 1.5 pounds, so the disappearance could be more carefully monitored.

Then the Coffeebot instruction poster was amended to include the names of official Coffeebot contributors. IN REALLY LARGE FONT. I guess in an effort to shame poachers.

But the corker was when I went into the kitchenette last week and stumbled into a conversation between two other club members about trying to quantify how much consumption is “normal” use. (“If there are four pots a day, that’s [some figure of ounces] of ground coffee, so 1.5 pounds should last [some period of time].”) They said they were engaged in "coffee sleuthing", because apparently running through that quantity of coffee in less than three days is excessive.

And they were discussing installing a web can to monitor who actually takes coffee from the pot.

Look—if I’m lying, I’m dying. I do not make this stuff up.

Leaving aside the issue that where they were talking about mounting the camera wouldn’t have provided them with any useful information (unless shots of hands emptying and refilling the basket could be considered useful), and the whole creepiness of setting up traps for your fellow employees, how petty do you have to be to even consider it?

First of all—this coffee is so bad, it’s probably on some war crimes lists. Second: if someone’s in such dire need of any coffee-like drink substance that they’re willing to dance with death to snag a cup—I say, let ‘em have it. As it is, my $5 is going to pay for your half-and-half, which you apparently buy by the half-gallon and which I am never going to use. Do you hear me whinging about that?

In its efforts to appear more with-it, our HR has been talking about maybe standing up for coffee and tea in the kitchenettes. They announced this at a big all-staff meeting a few weeks ago. I got my dog into this fight as soon as I could. I recommended they not install coffee pot systems (because of the whole sludge thing), but go for one-cup-at-a-time jobbers. Either pods or individual grindings at point of dispensing.

But then I went for broke: made an impassioned plea for a full-blown espresso machine in the area currently underused 11^th floor lunch room. HR has plans for converting the space into a “downtime” area—sofas, rugs, possibly a guitarist, I don’t know. But I got in there and made the case for installing an espresso machine, which would give people a reason to go up there, even if they have coffee on their floors.

I see a doctor in a building near Union Station that has a heavy-duty commercial-grade espresso machine in the lobby. I sometimes invent reasons to visit this doctor, just so I can make a latte on my way in. And out. This would be my dream.

It even uses little disks instead of pods, so it’s environmentally friendly. Plus, it makes cold drinks, too. And it only costs $11K. But that’s list. Nobody pays list.

This may be an amenity too far, but I’m going to play it for all it’s worth. We deserve it. At least, I do.