2011-05-18

Coffee impatience

There aught to be a law requiring all companies of a certain minimum size to ban certain types of coffee machines from the workplace and immediately substitute them with this one:
I'm not speaking of the espresso machines, I'm speaking of two normal kinds you almost always find: the glass pot on a hotplate kind, and the carafe where you press down on the pump at the top kind.  The problem with these is efficiency with getting at your coffee.  Here's why these other kinds suck:
  • You have to wait for the whole pot to finish filling because the coffee goes in the same opening you pour it out from.
  • Even when the pouring stops, you also have to wait for the dripping to stop, further frustrating the impatience.
  • Other coworkers may get impatient and just take the carafe out anyways and let the drips splash on the counter or hotplate, creating a mess.  If they're polite, they'll maybe put a paper napkin there.
  • Some even more impatient coworkers will remove the carafe, put their cup under the pour, then put the carafe back, creating a mess during the transition.
  • I can't just wait there for a full pot to finish brewing so I go to my desk and come back to find the carafe has already been raided.
  • The last of the raiders didn't start a new brew so I have to go through the process again.
  • Or they won't start a new batch because there's some coffee left, but not enough to fill my (admittedly larger) cup.
  • To keep people from going crazy, you normally need multiple carafes so that you rotate them in and out but that doesn't solve the immediate problem.
Anyhow, the third vastly superior variety pictured above and solves all of these problems:
  • The brew enters the top and pours out the bottom.
  • You can get at your coffee AS IT IS brewed without interrupting the process and without waiting for it to finish.
  • You never need move the carafe at all and therefore don't need any extra carafes (except for e.g. big meetings).  So no mess.
  • There's a lovely level indicator on the front so you know to start a new batch for the next guy without interrupting your current coffee claim.
  • It's just bloody efficient.
In my office building, each floor has a couple kitchens.  The one nearest me uses those bloody carafes.  The big one on the floor below has the nice one.  I guess that's good enough, but they should really just replace them all.

i need to cut down on coffee

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