devarim

(with apologies to aNYj, who probably thinks this entire story is blasphemous)

In my current workplace, we have a shared one-cup-brew Flavia coffee maker. Mid-morning today, I ventured down to the breakroom for a cup, two quarters in hand to feed the machine. Popped in quarter...the machine spit it right back. Popped it in again...rejected again. Flipped the quarter, re-inserted...nope. Tried the other quarter (even though I need fifty cents for a cup). Nothing doing. Lindsay, who went on this coffee machine field trip with me, tried one quarter and then the other. No luck. "Maybe it's out of water," I speculated. "Maybe the coin bank is full," Lindsay suggested.

I was about to take this as a sign that maybe I should skip the caffeine (I try to keep my consumption down to the equivalent of one cup of coffee per day), when Lindsay noticed that the machine's display said: "FREE VEND." Hmmmm... I selected "Tea or Coffee," popped in my coffee packet of choice, wiggled my environmentally-friendly reusable mug into the proper location, and: coffee!

Now, here comes the fun part. You see, my mug holds 16 ounces of liquid. The coffee machine pisses out an 8-ounce cup per fifty cents, which is probably better for my health but generally makes my cup look pathetically half-full.* So, after my cup was half-filled with caffeinated goodness, we looked back at the display and saw that it still read: "FREE VEND." And why have only half a cup of coffee when you can have twice as much for the same price? So I picked up another packet of the same coffee type (Costa Rica, if you must know) and repeated my free-coffee-getting process. Thereafter, my mug was quite full.

And now, forty-five minutes later, my eyes are quite widely open.

-=-

* Oh, don't get me started here. You know how the optimist sees the glass as half-full and the pessimist sees it as half-empty? I never got that. I always fixated on the "half" rather than the full/empty bit. What kind of optimist sees that a glass is only half full? It's diminishing to the fullness of it all! So when I say something is half-full, there is no happiness or optimism about it at all, trust me.