So they've got to find those extra cups to fill

[austin_dern]

There was one more Mother's Day present, received Mother's Day; this one came from my father. It arrived weeks ago and my father wrapped it in this nice paper with sparkly bits all over, and which he then set on one of the living room chairs partly covered by a blanket in the hopes of keeping the cats from ripping up the paper. Despite my father's pessimism about that, that part worked. However, over weeks it did shed a lot of glitter, so that the chair now has this eerie and unnatural glow to it. The cats have been avoiding the cleared portions of the chair.

This gift was a coffee maker. An elaborate coffee maker. One of those coffee makers where you're a bit afraid to actually use it, so naturally it fell to me --- who only drinks coffee when he misunderstood the question --- to set it up. It was also one of those coffee makers where it's inside a box, inside of which are three boxes, inside one of which is two boxes, inside of which is the coffee maker, laid on its side and labelled ``this side up''. But the time spent unpacking it, largely in getting the smaller boxes out of the larger ones despite the implications of the vacuum created by tightly sealed boxes, didn't match the time spent in setup.

What threw us first is that you have to fill up the water reservoir before you can, oh, set the clock. I suppose this was designed as some kind of safety interlock where you can't accidentally program it to heat up water without there being water, but the effect was my mother and I --- I'd like to note we're both PhDs --- were watching it, unsatisfied, reporting ``NOT READY TO BREW'' for five minutes even though there was some water in the reservoir. They meant they wanted it full.

According to my mother, the coffee flavor (it also does tea and cocoa, although it came with pouches for many flavors of coffee, exactly one tea pouch, and no cocoa pouches) is excellent, but the attempts to make it turn on and brew automatically haven't worked. We certainly set up the clock by the instructions, we think, although it's possible we missed page four of eighteen or the like. I'm sure something will come of this all.

Trivia: The first tea garden to open in London appears to have been in Vauxhall Gardens in 1732. Source: A History Of The World In Six Glasses, Tom Standage.

Currently Reading: The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, And The History Of The World From The Periodic Table Of The Elements, Sam Kean.

Comments

[chefmongoose.livejournal.com]

Pouches, is it a Senseo then? I have a Keurig, which is much the same principle but in little cups. Rather convenient, and has resulted in my drinking coffee more than I did except during college.

--Chi

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

No, no, it is cups and it's a Keurig. I was grasping at the right word to describe what the coffee comes in and for some reason ``cup'' wasn't answering. I think the idea of ``coffee cups'' was distracting me.

[chefmongoose.livejournal.com]

I end up saying 'The little cups, kind of like giant creamer cups'.

I shall recommend http://www.greenmountaincoffee.com/ as a very good source for refills, as is Amazon (but be careful and read the Amazon reviews- I've gotten burned on cheap but awful.) The sort of 'holy grail' price is 50 cents a cup; rarely achieved but good to jump on if found at that price.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

I've seen Green Mountain Coffee around, here and there, but I'm not sure I've tried it. I think it's the preferred coffee for my car dealership, but since I go right to the tea I don't know what brand that is.

[gafennec.livejournal.com]

When I worked as a security guard at Kennesaw State College (now University) one of the worst things in the world was to be going through a building a smelled god awful and looks like black sludge in a warped glass (hmmm. how can I describe the shape?) onion. So giving very explicit instructions to PHD types on how to make coffee makes a lot of sense to me.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

I don't by itself have a problem with giving very explicit directions; probably that's better in the long run. And making the system lock out some dangerous operations, like setting the timer to start heating without there being enough water in the tank, is a reasonable failsafe mechanism. But when the result is counterintuitive --- you can't set the clock until you've filled up the water? --- the instructions ought to point this out and say why it's designed that way. Arbitrary instructions are hard to follow; directions which explain themselves are easy. Usually.

[bunny-hugger.livejournal.com]

Does it have to use pouches, or is that just a bonus that it came with? I have a pretty fancy automatic one (though not as finicky about water levels) but it fortunately uses normal filters and stuff.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

That was a bonus, or at least a loss leader, that it came with. It also came with a catalogue of many, many kinds of coffee or tea and one or two cocoa that you could buy as refills.

But it also comes with a frame for putting your own grounds, acquired from whatever source you like, in where the cup would go and I believe that's going to be the main application as my mother quite likes certain Starbucks blends and part of the gift was a sack of said grounds.

[chefmongoose.livejournal.com]

I'll also note, I've had my Keurig for about four years now; I don't use it for tea nor cocoa. The cocoa cups turned out a bit on the weak side save for the least-water setting, and the tea was okay, but.. a good 300% more expensive than putting a teabag in a cup of hot water, and for no real increase in flavor. Come to thin of it, the cocoa has about the same price increase.

For coffee, I know it's more expensive than using ground coffee through a filter would be, but for my 2ish cups of coffee a week and the decrease in fuss, I'm quite accepting of this.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

I must admit I feel a little spendthrift when I buy the teabags in the 25-for-$3.00 pack instead of $2.50, but it can be worth it, particularly for the more exciting flavors.