My personal war with the office coffee machine

It looks harmless, but it can ruin your
reputation at the push of a button. As I’m sure anyone who has the pleasure of the nine-to-five grind in an office setting can understand, the office kitchen is a very treacherous place full of mystery and danger. It does have its upsides, such as how it keeps me in the banana trade without ever having to purchase fruit myself, but you can only find these benefits after wading through a veritable sea of delicious treats that do their darnedest to knock you off your diet. I am convinced that between the cookies and cakes (and I mean full-on, multi-layer, chocolate cakes) and the little bowls of Gummi Bears spread about the office at critical intersections, someone here is trying to get us fat and bake us into a pie.

But there is one particular item in the standard office kitchen that will continue to elude me and, I’m sure, thousands of other office denizens around the world: the coffee machine. Let’s be honest – we all know how to make coffee. We all have machines at home and all of us are well versed in the theory of brewing whether we took the introductory college class or not. Hot water goes through the grounds in the filter and then pours into the pot. Voila – fresh brew. Yet it never seems to work that easily when it comes to the coffee in the office kitchen. There is always some established system that any deviation from which will cause the standard coffee machine, that looks surprisingly like the one at home, to produce a viscous sludge that will bring the whole office to its knees. I know this because this happened to me yesterday.*

First, a quick flashback. In my old job as an agent assistant, the coffee was always already made by the time I arrived until the guy who came in the earliest quit and wasn’t replaced. The coffee making duties then fell to me, which wasn’t so bad since we had an automated machine that accepted pre-packaged amounts of coffee and there was little room for error. The partners decided they no longer wanted the luxury of this coffee maker so it was replaced with two separate machines to make regular and decaf, but with the old maker went the coffee packets and we were seemingly left with no coffee. Searching through the fridge I discovered a jar of grounds (unlabeled of course), which I proceeded to use for the next few weeks. This was until one of the partners saw what was happening and alerted me to the fact that the jar contained not coffee, but espresso. Entertainment is already a very stressful business – and I was inadvertently drugging the office.

You would think the years of experience would teach me, but apparently not. Yesterday the woman who typically sets up the coffee was out and we were forced to perform the task ourselves. Usually the machine has a new filter full of grounds in it so the next person just has to fill the pot and turn it on, but that wasn’t there either. When I came back to the kitchen desperate for my fix, I was on my own and I had no idea what the system was – how many scoops, which coffee to use or what kinds of voodoo spells to speak over the coffee maker. Trying to figure it out, I discovered there were two jars of coffee and both had weird crystal grounds instead of the normal-looking ones, so I just loaded it up with an arbitrary amount and set it to brew.

Apparently I have no clue what instant coffee is, as that is what I put in the machine. You’re just supposed to add water and it turns instantly to coffee, so brewing it was sure to yield interesting results. And interesting results they were - the office is still talking about the foul and vile liquid that poured forth from the nozzle that led me to empty my cup, throw out the pot, and swear off coffee. At least until this morning. Apparently the actual coffee grounds are in the nondescript Tupperware container hidden under the filters and stir sticks. Of course! Why not look for coffee everywhere except where there are clearly labeled jars of “coffee.”

There is always a system to office coffee. My advice is if you don’t know it, stay the hell away. The kitchen is a place of danger and mystery – if you go in there without knowing what you’re doing, you just might be up to your neck in deep-fried pastries and poison coffee. You’ve been warned.


*In the interest of full disclosure, I should say at this point that I am, at times, accident-prone. I have managed to get myself into some oddly embarrassing situations that most people are able to avoid with the greatest of ease. I like to say that I’m just thinking so far ahead that I can’t see what exactly is on the sidewalk in front of me, but I think the more common term is “klutz.”