Coffee Maker Blues
Mon, 11/11/2013
By Scott Anthony
It was a typical groggy morning as I shuffled into the kitchen to grind the coffee and pour the water into the machine. I hit the ‘on’ switch, then went to the front door and groped around in the half-dark to look for the newspaper on the porch. Back in the kitchen, I sat down and waited for the tell-tale hiss that lets me know the appliance is done brewing my joe.
No noise. Not a good sign. I got up and looked at it and found that the switch was lit up, but no black water was in the carafe. Inside the lid the water sat dumbly tepid. ‘Dagnabit’, I thought to myself (or I may have said it out loud…I was pretty groggy), ‘the infernal machine has died’.
When Mrs. Anthony came downstairs she saw me carrying the carcass of the defunct appliance out to the garage. She said, ‘WHAT…not again!’ Still not awake, it had not dawned on me until I put the thing on the workbench that there was already two other machines there on the bench awaiting repair.
What, I ask you, has the world come to when a man cannot depend on his most important of kitchen appliances to function dependably? There on my work bench sits the equivalent of approximately $200 dollars of broken apparatuses, appliances that I purchased in good faith only a few years or months prior and which now refuse to operate. This is not a good omen for the future of mankind.
Remember years ago, when a person spent a few of their hard-earned dollars on some precious piece of machinery designed to make life easier and that piece of machinery did exactly what it was designed to do for so many years that it got passed down through the family?
There are some lucky people out there who are in possession of items like this, tools like vacumn cleaners made in the seventies that still pick up dirt like new. Blenders that Grandma gave to Mom, who gave it to you and the thing still grinds ice cubes in no time flat. Toasters that are so precious that they have pet names like ‘Toasty’.
My coffee makers have pet names, but I can’t print them here.
So what should I do about the electronic version here at home? I have repeated the same mistakes over and over. I get the thing in the house, tear open the box and throw it away along with the instructions (it’s a COFFEE MAKER…how hard can it be to operate?) and I lose the receipt. Yeah, sure, I could give the receipt to Mrs. A and then take it back, but the stores only sell the same things: Cheap, poorly made appliances with the longevity of a fruit fly. Do I seem bitter?
Maybe I should switch to tea.