That's Life - 11

The Corporate Coffee Rule

I am grateful to Mr. Huffman, my previous project manager for two things. He taught me how to use the office coffeemaker and he fired me from the project.

I don’t have words to describe his kind act of firing me from that project. If you worked two years in Powerbuilder Version 4, you would appreciate why I considered that as a kind act. Those who worked those two years on an ERP platform would relish the act even more.

I was on seventh heaven. I performed a neat somersault in the office and ran home! I was free. No more payroll debugging.. no more asset management. I was a free bird.

Coming back to the topic.. I learnt how to prepare coffee under his auspicious guidance. This was way back in 1999 when most corporate houses in the US still lived on semi-automatic Coffeemakers. One day I emptied the coffee pot into my cup and was leaving the room when he thundered in.

“You are supposed to prepare a fresh pot if you take the last cup.” He growled.

I was terrified and my legs began to shake. The cup in my hand found a vertical path to reach the spotless carpet below.

Mr. Huffman shook his head in dismay when I mumbled, “I don’t know how to make coffee” I wanted the Coffeemaker to open up miraculously at that time and suck me in. But I had to face it.. the ultimate truth. He told me the basic corporate coffee rule, which in his opinion was the most important rule in the books.

“If you take the last cup, you are supposed to prepare a fresh pot of coffee for the others.”

I bowed to him and followed his advice without fail. And then he fired me.

I bid a final good bye to our Coffeemaker and paused only a second to look at the coffee stain on the carpet which the janitor could not remove.

My days in the Mid West had come to an end with that incident. I found myself lurking near the beaches of San Francisco a couple of days later. The new client and the much needed new software architecture were refreshing. The first thing I did after coming to work on the first day was to check where the Coffeemaker was.

It was just a block away.

It took me five minutes to reach the Coffeemaker from my desk. I asked my manager to shift my desk.

“Why do you want to leave that place?” He was obviously surprised because he couldn’t see any reason why one would want to move away from a nice east facing Window cubicle.

“The photocopier and the fax machine are way too far from here.” I said.

He smiled, “And the Coffeemaker too.”

I smiled too.

Life had been pretty easy after that shift of work place. Then I found this remarkable pattern emerging in the pantry room. I was always greeted by an empty coffee pot. I then prepared a fresh pot, drank a cup and returned half an hour later only to be greeted by the empty coffee pot again.

It never used to happen in Toledo, Ohio - an “All American City”

I went back to my desk and took a big print out of the following message, “Please prepare a new pot of coffee if you drink the last cup.” I pasted it right next to the Coffeemaker hoping it would solve the problem.

It did.

For a few days after that I had enjoyed being greeted by some coffee in the pot. I patted my back for solving the problem so smoothly without offending anybody.

It took me exactly a week to observe the new pattern. Whenever I went to the coffee room, I sure had some coffee in the pot. But it was always the last cup and I ended up preparing a new pot every time. I thought it was just a coincidence. But I had a hundred percent strike rate with this hypothesis. The conspiracy theory was pretty clear to me.

My distinguished colleagues always left the last cup of coffee for me so that I’d be preparing the fresh pot. They came to the coffee room and if it was the last cup, they simply went to the elevator and zoomed to the next floor Coffeemaker to try their luck there.

I had spent around two months in this Coffeemaker role before I was transferred to a different location where they had an automatic coffee dispensing system.