6 a.m. and the Gritty Work of Making Coffee

by

Patti Dickinson

I am mechanically impaired.  Honestly, I am about to throw my coffee pot out the window. This thing has no conscience.  It is state of the art, and has just a bit more attitude than I can stomach at six in the morning.  It has a built-in bean grinder.  It grinds the beans on the left-hand side of this contraption, and they pour into this cone shaped thing right below the grinder and then the cone shaped thing slams over to the right where the water is, and that is how the coffee happens at my house. 

Not this morning.  Oh, no.  There was NO coffee in the pot.  It was all over the counter, dripped inside the silverware drawer and then all over the floor. Brown water, with crunchy coffee grounds everywhere.  Not exactly starting the day from a position of strength.  In fact, if I didn't have three kids and a husband to get out the door, I would have made the decision to go back to bed and try this all again in a couple of hours.

The cause of the difficulty was that I didn't put the filter in the coffee pot.  It was still in the dishwasher.  So the beans ground and dumped all over the counter.  Ditto the water.  When my husband came out into the kitchen, I was on all fours, mopping up the sludge.  

"Coffee pot not working?"  I mean, really.  I didn't even dignify the question with a response. "What happened, exactly?"  I told him that there was obviously a flaw with this machine, because no self-respecting coffee maker that was touting itself as state of the art, should grind beans onto a COUNTER. It should just not grind the beans at all if the filter isn't even there! It ought to have some sort of sensor --- coffee pot radar, that would prevent this sort of calamity. (Spoken from the all-fours position and let's just say not in a conversational tone.)   I mean, we can text message to another country (I did it once, Kansas City to London, where my husband was on business) and we have coffee pots with no common sense????

My husband would call this a "user error" (but he knew enough not to mention that when I was elbow deep in coffee grounds!).  But how does that explain the toaster jettisoning the toast onto the floor?