39 varities of junk is still junk

[jducoeur]

In preparation for our office move, the folks who supply our water filtration system, who would *desperately* like us to buy coffee from them as well, have given us a week or so free with their top of the line Goofy Coffee Machine.

On the one hand, it's quite the impressive gadget. Any coffee maker that not only has menus on an LCD screen, but has multiple *levels* of menus, definitely qualifies as a toy. They supplied us with a couple dozen varieties of things to put into it, including mixins like Milky Way and Dove Bar, to ensure that one associates this thing with indulgent sins. (Of course, it loses gadget points by requiring you to do work -- you navigate the menus to select what you want, and then it pops open the door and tells you which packets to put in. And really, I would probably say that putting the words "coffeemaker" and "on-screen menus" in the same sentence qualifies as Wrong.)

OTOH, it's pretty horrifying from an ecological POV, managing to require one or more big plastic-and-foil pouches per 6 oz cup. Fortunately, this isn't an issue, because it's all pretty terrible: the coffee manages to be both weak and bitter, and the tea is watery and uninteresting. So I suspect we will go back to our Plain Old Coffee from our Plain Old Coffeemaker after the move...

Comments

[learnedax.livejournal.com]

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.

[eclecticmagpie.livejournal.com]

I actually like the K-cup machines, for brewing tea. I wouldn't know how their coffee is, but it's the first machine I've encountered that brews a drinkable cup of tea. And there's a refillable, non-disposable K-cup available, though it's pretty expensive and, IIRC, made by a 3rd party, so the K-cup people don't get credit for it.

Not attractive enough for me to buy one, but I do think they're better than the average office joe-dispenser.