This week I came to the realizatio
n how much coffee means to me. It is a very, very important part of my
day. Without coffee, I really shouldn’t get out of bed in the morning because only bad things will happen. There is no life to my interaction with customers….there is no creativity to my business solutions and my overall mood is just terrible. Typically, this isn’t an issue, because up until a couple of months ago I used a traditional coffee pot apparatus that makes a pot of coffee in the morning. You can typically purchase these for about $29.95 at Target and they don’t look fancy and certainly don’t improve your status in the neighborhood, but they do make coffee. And if you are ok with cheap coffee brands such as Folgers, you can have coffee for what amounts to some VERY low amount of money for your home brewed coffee every morning. (or in my case 3-6 times per day).
So recently, we decided to join the rest of the world and get a Keurig coffee machine. Afterall, it seemed like the thing to do, everyone just had more fun with their Keurig, they laughed more, had better sleep and seemed like they were just in a better position in life. Maybe that’s just the peer pressure talking, but for some reason it seems right that the coffee machine you have always used for 20 years just isn’t cutting it any more. Kind of like firing Cal Ripken from the team after two decades of dedicated service and consistent performance, the move didn’t make much sense, but it seemed like the right thing to do.
So the Keurig definitely looks cool. It’s a nice color, has a fancy water tank and offers advice to you on a screen when you go to make your coffee in the morning. This Keurig company is very with it and probably a bunch of well-dressed, very cool people sitting in an office location somewhere brewing up their next cool coffee idea. Then you have the K-cups, which also are very cool, you just want to hold them or maybe put them in your pocket or possibly see how far you could throw one. If you have been living in Indonesia for the past ten years and haven’t seen these devices, you load the coffee into the system much like a bullet into a gun and then push the handle down and tell the machine how to make your coffee. It is worth a try just to see it work once.
What Keurig, and all of the Keurig lovers out there don’t tell you is that the machine and the device itself is a complete piece of crap. This of course is summarized, but what I’ve found is that if the machine isn’t calibrated correctly one day to the next, which from what I can tell could be that the Keurig didn’t sleep well the night before and is just in a bad mood, it won’t make coffee. A friendly message does pop up on the screen to tell you to call them about the issue, which I have several mornings now and there always is some friendly Keurig person on the other line. What they proceed to tell me is that you have to follow VERY specific directions where as to poke the K-cup on the bottom first, then load the machine, this works about 50% of the time. When the bad 50% happens, you need to run the machine’s cleaning device to clean one of the nozzles, this takes about 10 minutes. Needless to say, I’m missing a lot of coffee mornings and the world is suffering for it.
Then, just today, I find out that the K-cups are NOT recyclable. In fact, I am told that if you line up all of the K-cups that go to landfills each year end to end that they will circle the entire world one time. Now I’m not only NOT getting my coffee because some stupid machine works as consistently as a Yugo did, but I’m also killing sea turtles in the Pacific who are getting choked on my K-cups?!?! Now I’m mad, and as soon as I can convince my wife to let me, I will pull an Office Space on the Keurig and show it who’s boss in the backyard with a baseball bat.
Just say no to Keurig!
