I’m a simple man. All I need for a day’s work is an Internet connection and a bottomless supply of coffee. Take one of those things away and the day is suspect at best. Take away both and there’s really not much of a reason to get out of bed. Hey, I’m perfectly happy to sit in class all day, but scheduling the class in a room where the No Food or Drink Police monitor the place like a stalag, borders somewhere between foolish and evil. If you expect people to actually stay awake and at least attempt to focus, a coffee friendly zone is pretty much a necessity. As it is, I’ll probably just spend the rest of the week in an un-caffeinated haze. Please disregard my nodding head and puddle of drool on the floor.
Tag Archives: coffee
From the Mailbag: Energy Shot
The Question: How about you take on buying “energy shots” to make it through the day versus getting enough sleep to make it through the day?
The Answer: I wish this is one I could take on with some authority, but I don’t have any actual firsthand experience with these newfangled energy drinks. In the finest traditions of blogs everywhere, though, I’m not going to let my lack of expertise or experience stand in the way of issuing a definitive opinion on the matter.
The closest I’ve come to trying an energy drink was an unfortunate episode when a bartender handed me a drink made with Red Bull. As I recall, it tasted almost exactly like red cough syrup. That’s a flavor I don’t find particular appealing in an adult beverage and as I recall, most of it was left sitting on the bar.
While I can’t speak with any competence on Red Bull or 5-Hour Energy, I do have a certain familiarity with coffee – civilization’s original energy drink. I’d be hard pressed to function without its steady rush into my system throughout the day. At the moment, I’d say I average somewhere in the vicinity of a pot a day. Some days it’s a little more, some a little less. When it gets to be a lot less, then the blinding headaches start so that doesn’t happen very often.
I’m sure there’s plenty of virtue in getting a “full night’s sleep”, whatever that is. Personally, if I spend more than about six hours in bed I can’t quite shake the feeling that I’m wasting too much time just laying around being more or less unconscious. In fact I’m pretty annoyed that sleep demands even that fifth of my day, when there always seems like something more productive or at least more interesting that I could do with that time.
Maybe it’s the wimp’s way out, but I suspect that right combination of stimulants and sleep are probably intensely personal. What works for me probably won’t work for someone else. How else could I explain people who seem to spend their whole weekend in bed (other than calling them out as incredible slackers, of course)? As it stands, I’ve got maybe 35 good years left on this rock and I don’t intend to spend a third of them abed.
The first twelve minutes…
It’s Monday. I’ve been at my desk for about 12 minutes this morning. And someone just wandered by to ask if I had read the 15 separate issue papers that arrived over the weekend. Of course I’ve read them. Somewhere between finding the coffee pot, hanging up my coat, and waiting seven minutes for my computer to boot up. I know that some people spend the weekend thinking about these things and rush breathlessly into the office on Monday to get in there and “make a difference.” I, on the other hand, am a bit like an old car. I need time in the morning to warm up before jumping into anything requiring a lot of horsepower or fine motor skills.
Even on my best day, the answer to “what have I done in my first 12 minutes in the office” is pretty universally “not much.” Check back in an hour – or 45 minutes if you’re really in a hurry – and there’s a fair chance I’ll have had time to get caffeinated and come up with whatever you need. Believe me when I say that standing there looking at me haplessly like a mammoth stuck in the tar pits isn’t going to help your cause. It’s pretty much just going to annoy me more than usual and slow down the whole process.
Editorial Note: This part of a continuing series of posts previously available on a now defunct website. They are appearing on http://www.jeffreytharp.com for the first time. This post has been time stamped to correspond to its original publication date.
What Annoys Jeff this Week?
1. Waiting. Some people, God bless them, are able to sit all day waiting on something to happen. Me? Not so much. Blame it on computerization, the Internet, youth or whatever else you blame such things on, but the bottom line is I’m not a patient person. When something is supposed to happen, I want it to happen right the hell now. Maybe that’s something I should work on, buti don’t think I have the patience for that.
2. Alarm clocks. On any given weekday morning, the alarm built into my phone goes off twice. I don’t remember the last time that work me up. About ten minutes later, my normal alarm clock sounds. That one might wake me half the time. The third and last line of defense is the rediculously loud alarm I picked up from Amazon. That one is still getting me up, but it’s taking longer and longer to get my attention. Another month or two and I’ll probably be immune to that end too. What I’d really like is an alarm that wakes me consistently without needing to set three or four different clocks. Sure, it seems like overkill, but it’s barely getting the job done. Surely there’s a better way.
3. Parking garages. This is America. We drive big vehicles here. Many of us have full sized cars, trucks, and SUV’s that are not only tall, but also wide. While I completely respect your efforts to cram as many parking spaces as possible into that fancy seven story garage you built, what I’m going to need you to do is widen up those spaces a bit so I don’t have to use two of them, every time I come visit or leave a big chunk of my vehicle hanging precipitously far into the travel lane. This is really something that I shouldn’t need to mention in the country that decided the Hummer would be a good ride for in and around town.
4. Bad coffee. If you’re going to charge almost $3 for a 20 ounce cup of regular, no frills drip coffee, there’s no reason you can’t make it from legitimately good grounds. Whatever you lose in the margin will be more than made up for by people who don’t go seek out your competition for the next cup.
What Annoys Jeff this Week?
By popular demand, I’m pleased to post the 15th installment of What Annoys Jeff this Week. I promise, unless I’m cut down by another bout of the sickness, that I’ll do my best to keep up with it as a regular feature.
1. Primary Elections. The field of potential candidates starts out vast, but by the time a state with a real population gets around to voting the field has already shrunk to just a handful. By the time the great State of Maryland gets around to holding its primaries on April 3rd, it’s a pretty good bet that the field will have already narrowed down to one. Letting the party unite behind a single candidate early is great… for the candidate and for the party. It’s pretty crummy for the voters, though. If we can all agree that our national general election day is always going to be the Tuesday after the first Monday in November, surely we can come up with a similarly convoluted methodology for holding primary elections all on the same day. So, you know, my vote here in Maryland is worth as much as the ones cast in New Hampshire or South Carolina. I’ll hold my breath waiting on that good idea to take hold.
2. Sub-freezing Weather. Sure, I know everyone complains about the weather but nobody does anything about it. This is a blog after all, so it’s only real mission in life is to serve as a voice box for all the bitching and complaining I can come up with… Which is why I’m going to announce my official opposition to temperatures anywhere below 32 degrees. The only purpose of being that cold is to enable snow production and if there’s not going to be snow (and the accompanying day off from work), then it has no business being below freezing. There. I said it.
3. Ground Coffee. I’d be willing to say that my daily intake of coffee is probably higher than the average person, but that’s a topic for a different discussion. All I really want is just to be able to buy a pound of ground coffee. I don’t want a 12 ounce package, or God forbid, the 10.5 ounce size that I almost picked up. One pound of coffee gets me exactly through one week. It’s the perfect proportion of requirement to availability. 10.5 ounces, on the other hand, gets me to about Wednesday… for the same price I was paying for a full pound back in the “good old days”… You know, four or five years ago. I’m sure someone ran a focus group and said people would rather get a smaller size for the same cost than get the same size for a greater cost, but what that didn’t take into account was the people in that focus group were apparently morons. Seriously. Just give me a pound of coffee and if you have to charge me $12 instead of $8, I’ll live with that. I’m perfectly comfortable with the idea that decreased supply means increased price and with the notion that inflation drives up the price of everything over time. Trying to pull a slick one with packaging, though, just makes you look like a bunch of tools.
No man’s land…
I’ve spent the last week feeling somewhere between sick and well. It’s not that I really feel bad in any way I can put my finger on, but then again it’s not that I’m feeling bad enough to want to stay on the couch all day trying to recover. It’s a madding no man’s land between the two. If there’s some fall crud lurking around, I wish it would just smack me around and be done with it. As it is, mustering the enthusiasm to do much of anything is getting to be a bit of a chore. Until I figure out what it is I’ve got and convinced it with high doses of chemicals that it needs to go away, I’ll keep treating the symptoms with ridiculous amounts of caffeine administered regularly throughout the day. That course of treatment might leave some people awake half the night, but the one perk of whatever it is picking at my system is I’m practically sound asleep before my head hits the pillow. Now if I would just start waking up rested, we might just be in business.
Lounge…
Looking out the kitchen window into the inky blackness of 6AM, while I was waiting for the coffee maker to quit dripping, I got smacked in the head by a memory of a place where I haven’t set foot in over a decade. The old Honors Lounge was a half-subterranean affair stashed just off the boiler room in Guild Center. It had the benefit of not just being secluded, but also of being close to almost all your classes if you happened to be a social science major. Though the furniture was of suspect cleanliness, it was comfortable in that beat to hell kind of way that hand-me-down furniture tends to have. On most days it was a great place to find a conversation or an argument and it beat walking all the day down the hill to Lane Center or Cambridge if you needed to kill an hour between classes. More important than any of that, though, the Honors Lounge had a coffee pot and usually a giant drum of Maxwell House in the fridge. Sure, if you went in too early on a Monday morning there might have been mold growing in the filter or scorched sludge in the pot if someone left it on over the weekend, but the important part was that it was there at all. Fresh, hot coffee on demand. That was living big. As long as you liked your coffee black that is, since your chances of finding creamer or sugar stashed somewhere were nil.
I don’t know what made me think of that this morning. Maybe it was the smell of freshly brewed coffee wafting up at me. Maybe it was the last exasperated gurgle the machine made before giving up its piping hot wonderfully caffeinated beverage. Since I’m not a fancy big city psychologist, I’ll probably never know what exactly triggered that particular memory, but for a few seconds this morning, I was standing right there in Frostburg looking out the window towards Old Main waiting to pour a fresh cup before walking down the hall to class.
Grounds…
Few things in life are as rewarding as that first cup of coffee on a cool summer morning. It doesn’t have to even be good coffee, really. Even cheap coffee well made will do the job. But with good beans and a quality machine, it’s almost a religious experience. That’s what makes it so traumatic when a good machine goes bad. My beloved Krups super-machine has broken with the one true faith and begun dumping grounds into the pot. That’s got to be like taking a leak in the holy water, right? Right.
Ok so maybe that’s a slight exaggeration, but I’ve been limping along with a machine that makes the bottom half of the pot undrinkable for a couple of weeks now. It’s time to put the old girl out to pasture… and right it off as a disappointing $100 investment. Is it bad that I really want to get one of those industrial-sized machines that they have in convenience stores?
Ugly Mug…
One of the side benefits of having an extensive road schedule is being able to sample great locally produced coffees. Several producers from Kona still top my “best of” list, but the downside is that a pound of most pure-Kona coffees will set you back $20-30. As much as I love coffee, even I’m too cheap to brew that on a daily basis.
Here in Memphis, I have found a local company, that I highly recommend. At the moment, I am enjoying the just-brewed goodness of their Southern Pecan offering. If you’re looking for a cup of coffee that is highly drinkable, but won’t break the bank, check out the Ugly Mug Coffee Co.
If you’re a fan of good coffee, order a bag. I think you’ll be pleased.
JEFFREYTHARP.COM 