Robot Coffee
FunnyCo's big enough to have an "Employee Council," and they do typical big happy family things, such as sponsor corporate picnics and give away circus tickets, without ever effecting substantive improvements in the workplace environment (their charter mission). I don't think they've emptied out their "suggestion" (aka "bitch & moan") boxes for a while.

Since I don't socialize much with co-workers (I find it's best to keep work and personal lives somewhat distinct), I'm not a big fan of corporate picnics. F'rinstance, I'm not going to kick back and have a few with my bosses, ever, unless of course they want to sponsor me for membership into their country clubs. And uncannily, the circus tickets and such are always for evening performances (unanswered memo to management- a lot of us work evenings).

They do want to try to make us happy, though. There've been a few attempts over recent years to organize a labor union at FunnyCo, and they don't want that. They spent over $150 grand on a counter-organizing effort the last time there was a petition on the table, so what's the cost of a few circus tickets compared to that of negotiating a collective bargaining agreement?

Our coffee at FunnyCo sucks, and has sucked in perpetuity. We had a typical setup- commercial Bunn-O-Matic brewer, a couple of scalded carafes that were never washed, and single-serv pouches of the cheapest possible "house brand" coffee now with 70% post-consumer grounds! But there were alternatives; you could always bring in your own better beans from home, and there are a lot of coffee and donut shops within walking distance.

I guess the Employee Council got wind of the consensual dissent fomenting in the ranks (They don't like the coffee! We better fix that or they'll start unionizing again!) so they recently got the coffee vendor to bring in a complex, high-end single-cup gourmet coffee brewing system called the Keurig (which, in proper Germanic pronunciation, would be "KOO-reek.")

The system employs the use of individual, self-contained polypropylene cups containing grounds and filter, only slightly bigger than cups of creamer, and it could be easy to confuse the two. Any day now, I'm going to make a cup of hot, watery milk. To make coffee, you stick the cup into the maw of the apparatus, slide your mug onto the drip grate, and press play. Presto! Thirty seconds later, you have a fresh cup of somewhat weak coffee. You can't customize the brew, so the overall effect is that of steeping a tea bag for half a minute. Time's up!

It's better than it was. It's quick, convenient, doesn't fill the office with the smell of scorched coffee on a pot boiled dry, and not nearly as bad as instant coffee. But the gimmickry of this coffee robot is astounding. Lots of flashing lights, servomotors, and unseen moving parts that pierce the little plastic coffee basket, force six ounces of pressurized hot water through it, then eject the basket into a collection bin wth a satisfying ker-chunk sound.

And it's not cheap. I looked up what those individual baskets of coffee cost. Even at a volume discount, they're in the neighborhood of 40 cents each. With several hundred folks drinking several cups of coffee each day, I'm wondering when the coin slot's going to be unveiled, and am starting to take bets with my co-workers. Over coffee, of course.

And it's proprietary (the cups are called "K-cups^®," covered by one or more US patents!), so the days of bringing in one's own bags of fresh-ground are over.

This is a great example what happens when decisions are made by a remote committee. We didn't have to trash the Bunn-O, of course. We could have tried, say, paying a few more pennies per pound and at least gotten brand-name coffee. Or they could have used someone like my dad, who was always opposed to geegaws and gimcracks in that comic-crackpot Hank Hill way. I remember him arguing with a Lincoln-Mercury salesman about why all the Continentals had to come with power windows. "Just something else that'll break eventually, and I can fix my own window crank."

My dad could also drink anything and call it coffee without complaining, come to think of it. And he was in a labor union. Even if he was reluctant to waste money on "lazy things" like power windows, at least he could afford a Lincoln. Maybe he was onto something after all. 12:04:34 PM    comment []trackback []