Blog Number 71

Greetings and welcome to today's random thought.

I am fortunate to work for a company that provides free coffee.  Not only that, but they have the industrial size coffee brewing machines that offers 2 separate brewing stations and 4 other burners to keep other pots of coffee warm.  The coffee room closest to my cubicle has all this but only boasts 3 coffee pots (2 regular and 1 decaf).  Back in Indiana, the office there only had 1 brewer and 2 extra burners but it also had the 3 coffee pots.

I am not sure that the superior coffee station does me any good since it is limited by the 3 coffee pots making all the extra burners irrelevant.  When I came in this morning, all 3 pots were full with blue-ish water.  This was a little scary initially as the only place I have ever seen water this color is in the toilets in airplanes.  Once that momentary thought left my mind, I realized that there must be some kind of cleaner in them.  Upon further inspection I discovered a 12 oz bottle of Squeak "N" Clean coffee pot cleaner in the corner.  I never knew something like this existed.
Anyway, my point (if I had one) was that if I wanted coffee, I was going to have to make some.  This was the way it was in Kokomo to a certain extent.  I had a very high ratio of "pots of coffee made" to "cups of coffee drank".  Ideally, in a perfect office society, if a pot of coffee provided 6 cups of coffee, you should have a 1:6 ratio.  I would estimate my ratio in Kokomo was maybe 1:3 or 1:3.5 (give or take, I don't have my spreadsheet handy where I used to keep track, hey someone has to keep track of these things!).  I envision the folks in Kokomo missing me (or at least missing that long haired dude that made the coffee).  I have only been in Texas for about 6 weeks and my ratio is about 1:5 so at least it is an improvement.

I read the directions on the cleaner and it simply stated that you had to rinse out the pot with water after using the product and you were good to go.  I did that and started a pot and then went back to my cube.  About 10 minutes later I went to get some coffee.  The other 2 pots were still there with blue water in them and my pot was about 1/2 gone.  I cleaned out another pot and started to brew a 2nd pot of coffee.  I also checked the hallways for dead bodies (just in case I didn't get the pot cleaned out properly on the 1st pot and that blue stuff was indeed toxic).  I did not see anyone suffering any ill effects so I poured a cup for myself.  Later in the morning I went for a 2nd pot and both pots were pretty empty so I combined them and made another pot.  This puts todays ratio at 3:2 today which really brings the average up given my short time here.

Hopefully this was just an off day for the Texas office coffee drinkers.  Otherwise I might have to test the toxicity of the blue stuff with a few random pots (just kidding of course, but hey someone has to keep track of these things).

Thanks for reading my Random Thoughts.

Jon