I can't believe how dependent people can get on a procedure without understanding what they are doing. It seems that to everyone else what happens inside the coffee maker is industrial voodoo. Powder goes in, a button is pressed, and magical coffee elves piss out the caffeinated ambrosia. This morning the coffee maker at work was out of order because of a leaking water supply tube. People were going across the street in the slush to spend absurd amounts of money to seek professional help at Starbucks.
Due to frightening white stuff falling from the sky at slightly higher elevations (I realized today that it does not snow in greater Vancouver, that white stuff is just people's brain cells falling out
en masse and blowing around) I had yet another Hell-commute. I wasn't going to face the morning with out coffee. I certainly wasn't going to walk through the slush in hard-soled dress shoes to spend twice what I pay into the weekly coffee fund for a single cup.
People were amazed at my coffee juju that I managed to make a carafe of coffee without the machine. I boiled water in the tea-drinkers' kettle, placed the filter basket from the machine on top of the carafe and poured the boiled water over the grounds. I am stunned and disturbed that absolutely no one had any concept of what was happening inside the machine. One woman actually said to me, "I didn't realize you could do that." Another pointed out that it was like losing the remote and not being able to change the channels on the TV. And yes, I actually attracted an audience by making coffee without the aid of the coffee machine.
I'm stunned that anyone over the age of three should find a coffee-maker an inscrutable device.
