Salocin

What keeps you going?

Things are rarely as they seem. What makes a company tick? The motivational effect of the senior staff? The systems that run the back-office? The perks that keep the staff motivated? Perhaps the accumulation of a very large number of small contributions? Human nature makes us try to identify these key areas, and key employees that go along with them, but the reality is that if you take any one thing away from a company, no matter how critical it's existence appears to be, the company will usually be fine. It adapts, compensates, and can learn to work around any missing piece.

Except, that is, for the coffee machine.

Ours is a big, black and blue thing. It's huge. One wonders what they must be doing to the coffee for it to take such a massive device to produce that small puddle of muddy-brown liquid. Where I work, you can get the free coffee, which is produced with a buzzing sound, or you can pay a nominal fee to get another coffee, which tastes slightly different. When you order the coffee that requires payment, the machine makes a grinding sound, as though coffee beans were being mulched on demand, but having never seen anyone replenish the stock of coffee beans, I think that one of two things must be happening.

Either there are no coffee beans, and the machine makes the sound in an attempt to induce the taste of coffee in your mouth through psychological manipulation. Sneaky.

Or the coffee beans were put in there when the machine was first built, back in the 80s, and when we order that particular variety of coffee, the dried rotting remnants of what was once Colombia's finest export are used to produce a cup of ... ahm ... whatever that is that comes out after the noises stop.

You then have to drink it before it dissolves the plastic cup it's held in.

Today, the machine broke down. I discovered this after putting in a little money, and pressing the sequence of buttons that usually result in the grinding sound. Only this time, it sounded more like someone was trying to take out a tree with a herd of chainsaws.

I don't know the people who sit around the area where the machine is located, but I felt like I ought to explain that the machine was having problems, and that my digestion was fine. I'm shy, so I just stood there, hoping that the noise would stop soon, arguing to myself that I wouldn't have been heard over the noise of the coffee dispenser committing ritual suicide anyway.

The noise stopped briefly, and I was expecting to hear the whirring sound as the machine takes the powdered milk and does something to it that causes it to froth (I think it mixes lithium in or something). Only it didn't whirr, so much as brutally murder a cat. As the sound of feline death throes came from the nondescript blue box in front of me, I was making like a chameleon, and colour-coordinating with the fire extinguisher as I felt the eyes from all the nearby desks turned towards me.

Finally, instead of the usual dribble of fluid into the cup, the machine made a coughing sound and spat - there is no other word for it - spat a small amount of milky foam into the bottom of the cup. Then all was still.

I dropped the cup into the trash as I walked back to my desk.

Only now, the coffee machine was extinct. Over the course of the day, I saw endless supplicants come to worship at the java altar, and each was subjected to the same embarassing ritual as I was, only to be sent away with a milky residue, looking rejected, and as sombabulant as when they arrived. Nothing seemed to work except the options that produce "tea", and although the coffee may be dubious, the tea is just evil.

Without coffee, narcolepsy stepped in, and I found myself remortgaging so that I could afford the Starbucks across the street to keep going. Starbucks is good, no matter what your neo-socialist, they-are-all-corporate-bastards biases, the coffee is nice, and the girl who works there thinks I'm a cheerful, positive guy, which puts her in a very small minority.

Posted by nlvp at March 23, 2006 05:12 PM