Discontent

This article was originally posted to LinkedIn on January 16, 2020

Twenty years ago this month I started a new job, and on my first day at the office I took my first coffee break. If you're a contact of mine on here, you've probably worked with IT people a lot, and perhaps are yourself an IT person. Thus you are probably familiar with how IT people tend to feel about coffee. I mean, sometimes it's tea, or sometimes it's Mountain Dew or Jolt™ or Red Bull, but the pause from active work and maybe the hit of caffeine and/or sugar are an important part of getting focused on the task(s) at hand. I cannot stress enough just how bad that office coffee was on that first morning. That was not a good coffee break. It did not increase my productivity. On my lunch break I went to Target and bought a kettle, a coffee grinder, and a French press. I became That Guy, the guy with the coffee stuff at his desk. I take my coffee and my coffee break seriously.

A few years later I started a different job, and it turned out there was already a team culture where everybody would end up in the break room at roughly the same time for a coffee (or tea) break. I wasn't even the only one with a French press. But the grinder situation was terrible, and I had recently upgraded my grinder at home so I brought the original one, the one I had bought at Target on that first lunch break, and left it in the break room for everybody to use (with a sticker warning dire consequences for anyone who should use it for flavored coffee, as much to show my bona fides as to threaten colleagues who didn't need actually need threatening).

And then I worked from home for a while. Since I didn't need two grinders at home I gave the first grinder away, but I still had my coffee break every morning while I thought about that day's first big task.

Another new job, another new office, another first day, and my girlfriend wouldn't let me take my spare French press. Don't be That Guy, she said. The office coffee came from a Keurig. I took my first coffee break out of the office and made plans. Power was an issue in this office, though, so I couldn't take an electric grinder. I went online and ordered a hand grinder. Turns out the 150 turns (or so) every morning were very meditative. But I was even more That Guy than I had been before. Sorry, honey.

By the time I moved on from that job I'd married that girlfriend, and on my first day at the new office she again wouldn't let me take my little hand grinder and French press. Don't be That Guy, she said. The office coffee came from a Flavia machine. It was no better than the Keurig had been in the previous office. As I told my new teammates I was going out for coffee, they said, “yeah, the coffee is bad,” and I told them what my wife had said. The response from one teammate was immediate and accurate: “We are all That Guy.”

Eventually our team was (pointlessly) shunted from the cubicles we had to a different set of cubicles, and as I cleaned out my new desk I discovered … another hand grinder, identical to mine, missing the nut on top that attached the handle to the shaft. I asked around and learned that a leader of a different team had once tried to start a Coffee Culture (similar to the one I'd had several jobs before), so he'd been the one to buy that grinder. Nobody knew why it was missing the crucial part, and it seemed to be long gone. Since the grinder was useless without the missing nut, he said to me, “oh yeah, you can just have that. Keep it for parts.” I thought about trying to order the actual missing part (a nicely machined, attractive hunk of metal) but figured as a stopgap I could just go to the hardware store and find a hex nut with the right size thread. I did that on my way home that day. So then I became That Guy with two hand grinders.

This morning as I made my coffee I noticed that my electric grinder (that same one I'd upgraded to above) seemed to be struggling. And the resulting grind was much, much finer than usual. Turns out it now needs a replacement part. Luckily, because of my career as an IT professional, I have a spare grinder I can use while I wait for the new part. Even more luckily, because I have a spare spare grinder (you could say even my spare grinder has N+1 redundancy) I have one grinder from which I can remove the crank handle entirely, since it has a hex nut on top, and I have a hex socket head of the same size that I can drive with a power drill. So my backup hand grinder is now my backup electric grinder, as long as my drill batteries hold out. (Two batteries. N+1 again).

I don't even write software anymore, but I am prepared for any coffee emergency.