Technology is scary

Since we moved into this office, we’ve been using an old coffee maker that Brett had lying around in a cabinet. It’s been keeping us caffeinated, but at a cost: it takes 15-20 minutes to brew a pot of coffee. We’re not even exaggerating. We’ve even cleaned it SO many times.

Now that we have more people than ever working here (and drinking coffee), we decided it was time to upgrade. Mindy did some research and settled on a coffee maker that looks like it’s right out of the Jetsons or Fallout 4:

Check out all its majesty.

It’s beautiful, modern, sleek, new, and fast. And we’re all terrified of it.

So let’s explain something. We’re all geeks. We like books and board games. We enjoy curling up with a warm drink and a cool book. We quote Pat’s book at each other shamelessly and argue about the forgotten meanings of obscure words. Some of us like gadgets (Amanda loves her shiny new Pebble Round), so we’re not luddites. But this is a coffee maker on a whole new level. It has a digital screen with icons, and makes beeping sounds. It suggests things that we might want to do with our coffee to make it better. It click-trained Rachel’s dog.

Okay, that last one may not be entirely true, but only because Rachel’s dog hasn’t been to the office yet.

Amanda (this is a true story) got this coffee maker ready to brew last week. She added water and grounds, like you do, then accidentally pressed a button to activate the timer. She had no clue how to deactivate the timer without messing up everything else. Rather than risk blowing up the entire office by trying to figure it out, she just pretended she was getting coffee ready for the next day. And it worked, and we had coffee the next morning, and all was right with the world. But it was a close call.

There’s an instruction manual, but we’re not sure where it went. We ARE sure that it glows under its own power, murmurs strange and wondrous things to those daring enough to listen, and contains the secrets to the universe written in sweet, sweet honey.

The joke’s on it, though. We already know the secrets of the universe, and they are coffee.

….or, in Rachel’s case, caffeinated hot chocolate.