I used to work for an accounting firm as an administration assistant.
As such, I’m sure you will understand the profound need for a decent amount of caffeine.
The firm was too stingy to by a decent coffee machine so we all had cheap instant stuff which was a bit depressing but it was better than nothing. And by better than nothing I mean that in the same way that getting brown leather school shoes from Santa is better than getting nothing.
As you can imagine, news that we were getting a coffee machine was met with delight office-wide.
We got the coffee machine not because of a stroke of generosity on the part of our bosses but because we did the accounts for this coffee machine company. The company had gone broke and couldn’t pay their bill. So they offered us a coffee machine as a form of payment.
Better than nothing hey.
Or not.
Once the coffee machine arrived it became pretty clear why the company had gone broke. It was a fussy little thing. Also because the company that made it no longer existed, to get it repaired you had to follow a certain formal process. This basically involved going and getting the receptionist and watching her poke and prod it until it started whirring again.
Something this coffee machine was really good at was breaking. More impressively, it seemed to stuff your coffee up in so many different ways. It wasn’t like “Oh from time to time, the printer gets a paper jam in the 4th tray” sort of malfunctions. The wide varieties of the way in which this coffee machine could crap itself were nothing short of impressive.
One ‘feature’ of the coffee machine was that when you asked it to make a drink, it used some coffee making skills to put something into your mug. At this point, it decided its work was done regardless of how much the final product resembled the drink that you ordered.
It did seem to understand though that different buttons were requesting different products so it actually made an effort to make each drink different. Over time I learnt how to translate the coffee machine’s button labels into what the coffee machine thought that they meant.
So sometimes nothing is probably better than ‘better than nothing’. You know what’s better than both, Shelley... She’s OK.
Xx
Smelle
"For Times When Mediocrity Is Just Too Good"
ReplyDeleteIs that copyrighted? Because I totally want to steal it and use it as my new motto.
Well I wrote it and you can copy it so I guess that's kind of a copyright. Copywrite.
ReplyDelete"when you asked it to make a drink, it used some coffee making skills to put something into your mug. At this point, it decided its work was done regardless of how much the final product resembled the drink that you ordered."
ReplyDeleteDescribes some of the Baristas in Canberra.