Okay, I told myself I was going to do this every day, but today it's proving more difficult. This has a lot to do with the fact that for the last couple of months I've been averaging one or two good night's sleep a week due to sick kids, a noisy cat, and a thunderstorm. The sick kids and noisy cat I'm kind of used to. The February thunderstorm feels like I'm being punished for something.
I have always maintained that a decent amount of sleep is the source of all my power (well, that and the light of your yellow sun). If I can sleep eight hours a night, I am essentially unstoppable. If get a few nights with less sleep, I'm slow and cranky. Worse yet, I'm uninspired to act on anything. I just want to sit and read or play video games or watch television. Oh, and eat. Eating is good.
Fortunately, I have my good friend coffee by my side, the only beverage that is universally free. Today, I conservatively estimate that I've had three pots of coffee. That's good. That's down from yesterday. Of course, I only slowed down today because it was giving me a stomach ache, but hey, whatever works, right?
Coffee can be kind of rough though. While universally free, free coffee tends to be squarely mediocre. The coffee my work supplies in abundance falls in this category. The first few cups are okay, but then it gets hard to drink, especially as I'm forcing myself to drink only black coffee on weekdays to avoid the massive amounts of creamer and sugar calories. Of course, it's better than the coffee at my last job, although they made up for bad coffee by occasionally supplying free beer. The job prior to that actually had a system that pushed all of the coffee through a series of used tube socks before it hit the pot. Okay, I couldn't actually prove that, but I'm pretty sure it's true.
My favorite office coffee was the work of Evil. By Evil, I'm referring here to an employee at my last job, not "that which causes harm or destruction or misfortune" (although I never really asked what he did in his personal time, so that may apply as well). When they hired him, he was the second Matt in the room, and as he had a goatee, he was naturally Evil Matt. They were hardly twins, but that didn't matter. Everyone knows goatee == evil.
Anyway, at one point we lost the employee who sat next to Evil, and before someone new could be hired, Evil had set himself up a coffee stand. Apparently, in a previous life Evil had been a barrista, and man did he have the set up for it. Big, honking espresso machine. Bean grinders. Mini fridge for milk. Heck, he even had the paper cups with the cardboard tube around them so you don't burn your hands. The man was hooked up.
Don't get me wrong - he wasn't running a business. You threw in some money for supplies if you wanted a cup of something and he made it happen. It was more of a public service. A barrista sitting in a room full of programmers - it was a beautiful thing to behold. I didn't even drink the coffee he made that often, I just admired the sheer audacity of the thing.
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