There’s one of them in every office. We’re not talking about photocopy machines or that one co-worker who spends all morning on Monday giving you the detailed play-by-play of their entire weekend at a mile a minute while all you can do is sit there politely, wishing you had about 10 more cups of coffee in you just so you could keep up with them. What we’re talking about is something much more sinister…
One of the longest-running and most-heartbreaking tropes of office life is as follows:
You wake up on your second alarm without time to grab a coffee on the way to work, traffic is awful, nobody else has any idea how to drive, you finally show up to work with about a minute to spare.
Just enough time to grab a cup of coffee in the break room before settling in to your 8-hour prison sentence next to Chatty Cathy, so you run to the coffee machine and you see that the carafe is empty.
Out of the corner of your eye, you see that one jerk from HR carrying three cups over for his co-workers. One of those should have been yours. And the kicker? This jerk didn’t even start a fresh pot after emptying the old one. So he shows to his side of the building with 3 cups and everyone treats him like a hero, but they don’t see the heads he stepped on to get there…
Such is office life.
There are two types of people in this world. Those who use the last of the coffee and start a fresh pot, and those who are evil entities sent from the underworld to ruin our mornings by emptying the pot and not starting a new one. Demonic.
A bit too dramatic? If you’ve ever been in this position, then absolutely not. Rather than leaving passive aggressive notes and trying to appeal to your coworker’s final shred of decency, it’s time to take matters into your own hands.
It’s time for it to be every person for themselves. Take matters into your own hands.
If there was a way to get your coworkers to make a pot of coffee when they finish one, we’d have found it already and the world would be a better place, but we’re just not ready as a civilization to conquer certain challenges yet.
With a single serve coffee maker, that one minute you have before your shift starts is all you need, that’s plenty of time to get a fresh, hot, tasty cup of coffee to help drag you through yet another morning. It takes just a moment to prepare yourself to deal with a play-by-play of every single thing that Cathy’s pet cat did over the weekend. Mr. Furball, bring it on.
Unfortunately, there aren’t any single serve machines that are small enough to fit into your desk yet, so they’ll still have to be in a communal place. We’re not saying you need to replace the existing machine with a single serve machine, but why not have both? While you’re waiting for your single serve to brew, those few seconds are all it’ll take to start a fresh pot in the larger machine. You know that expression that goes something like “you know society is in good shape when you have older people planting trees that they’ll never get a chance to sit under?” It’s kind of like that. You’ll get your cup sooner, and you’ll be a saint to whoever shows up next to you to find that full carafe on the other coffee machine. And you won’t have to ruin anyone else’s morning in the process, like that idiot over in HR…
So there you have it. A couple minutes is all it took to solve one of the biggest morning annoyances of most office workers. Imagine what kinds of conflicts and world issues we’d be able to solve if everyone was using a single serve coffee maker. That may sound like an exaggeration, and that’s because it is, but at the end of the day – who doesn’t love a perfect cup of coffee that’s ready in about a minute? That’s all we’re really getting at here.
