The Coffee Pot Saga

Last week I mentioned that our office coffee pot was removed. What follows is the rest of the coffee pot saga.

Around the middle of last week, the new vending company recognized our distress and threw us a couple of life preservers. It started with a new coffee pot two floors above us. When OoRah heard this, he grabbed his mug and ran for the elevator.

The rest of us were huddled together trying to stay awake when somebody ran into our department and shouted, "Free coffee on three!"

There's a coffee vending machine on the 3rd floor (we are on the 2nd floor). The vending company decided (was forcibly convinced) that the coffee vending machine would be free until they were able to replace all the coffee pots for us.

There were no less than 5 of us programmers who roared up the stairs. It literally sounded like a thunderstorm.

Later, a large group of us were gathered and sipping our brew. OoRah mentioned that his coffee from the new metal pot two floors up tasted funny. After a bit of discussion, we hit on the theory that the new coffee pot was *really* new. Therefore, it needed to have several empty runs to wash out all of the aluminum residue.

Keep in mind that OoRah was drinking a cuppa from this suspect machine as the theory was developed. The look on his face at the words "aluminum residue" was fantastic.

Late last week, the dream was finally realized. We got our new office coffee pot. It has one of those nifty metal pots, so we ran *lots* of hot water through it to make sure that OoRah was the only one of us who would be tainted.

Those things are impressive, I have to say. The pot is super-hyper-insulated, so much so that the outside was actually cold to the touch. I lifted the lid and the burst of steam nearly took my eyebrows off.

So, after a tumultuous week, we have a coffee pot at work again. Ordinary "joy" seems so shallow now.

I'm told that those metal pots are kinda hard to clean, but I'm not too worried about that in an office environment. We all know that an office pot will never be cleaned anyway. :)