Yes... many office dwellers wind up very proud of their High Tech Coffee System, which often has an otherworldly blue glow as well as overly complex menus. But you can't make a decent cup of coffee in 13 seconds. The tea you can make in 13 seconds is... charitably described as still technically tea. Strangely coffee-flavored barely-tea substance, at that. Not so strangely when you consider that all those exciting different flavors of coffee they boast of get shot through the same nozzle, which is rarely if ever cleaned.

The k-cup machines lost all illusion of technical prowess for me when I found out that they don't, as I had supposed, nest the cups, or compress them magically away, but merely toss them haphazardly in a small bin which needs to be emptied every 12th cup.

And they break every 10 days. But we keep buying them and repair them even in times of economic peril, because everyone just expects a good office to have one.