The coffee pot metaphor

A couple of years ago, in what was to become a semi-annual moving experience, I lost my coffee maker. I tend to make coffee every morning and so the loss was quickly felt. Off I went to the store and found a decent coffee maker for a good price.

I am not picky about the actual coffee maker, it is all basic when you get down to it. What I have found important are the beans. I grind beans instead of purchasing pre-ground beans. At some point I owned a small restaurant and one of the things I wanted to be perfect was the coffee, so I studied and found out a few tricks, key among them, good beans, ground for the coffee you are making, not in advance.

I brought the new coffee maker home, ran some water through it and brewed up a pot and right then I knew some designer was not a coffee drinker. No matter how you poured the coffee out of the pot, you would always get a dribble, usually next to the cup, sometimes on the floor, but always a dribble. The coffee pot had a lip on it designed to push the pouring coffee right into the cup. The design flaw was such that even that did not work, always a dribble.

I accepted the coffee pot for its obvious flaws. Nothing in life is perfect and we are all flawed, or sinners, in some way. The coffee pot was no different. So, for the last few years every morning when I poured a cup of coffee, I had to clean up the dribble from the canister. Mind you, there was no way around this, the imperfect coffee pot always leaked when pouring into a cup, always.

A few weeks ago I was cleaning the coffee pot and I dropped it on the floor. It shattered and to this day we are finding small bits of glass in the strangest of places. In some ways, right as the canister hit the floor and exploded, I was a little happy. I knew it would mean a new coffee maker, which was going to be a good thing, because I would no longer have to deal with the daily wiping of the mess left behind because of a design flaw.

So I went to a local store that sells coffee makers and I found the cheapest model possible, actually costing less than 10 dollars. I am giving up coffee, so I did not want my investment to be wasted and I figured, all coffee makers are pretty much the same.

I got it home, washed it and ran a test batch through the machine, even testing the canister to see if it leaked when pouring, it did not. Replacing the leaky coffee maker never occurred to me for the last few years, I accepted it was flawed, but it did its job, so who cared?

Then, to upgrade, even though the cost was lower, the value of the new coffee maker is a great deal higher than the broken coffee maker.

Lesson? Don't stick with the flawed one, when it is pretty simple to get a better whatever. I think that's the message, then again, coffee is kind of stupid.