The free coffee at work.
We complain about it, we drink it.
Complain, drink, complain, drink, complain, drink.
This is contemporary experience: drinking a drink we don’t like in order to help us work harder at things we would prefer not to be doing.
So let’s look at the reasons why this simple aspect of office life – coffee provided by your employer – sums up your entire goddamn experience in Corporate America.
First off…
It’s Not Very Good
Just like your job.
lol, jk.
But am I just “k”ing?
In corporate America, even people with “good jobs” joke, a little too much actually, about winning the lottery and how completely that would make them never ever think about their “good job” again.
A point stressed over and over by middle to upper management is data retention.
They literally plan around people winning the lottery, or at least use it as a euphemism, “make sure to save that spreadsheet to Sharepoint in case you win the lottery”.
They used to say, “…in case you get hit by a bus”.
So, an improvement, I guess?
You don’t have to hate your job, or even the free coffee, to feel like both are a bit of a compromise of what you’d truly rather be doing, or drinking.
Which leads conveniently to my second point.
It’s a Complete Compromise, and You’re Very Grateful For It
Maybe kids in France grow up smoking cigs, sipping espresso, indigent expressions on their youthful dour faces. Maybe that’s just what they tell people who have never been to France, about France.
But as an American kid growing up before Starbucks made insane monster candy drinks, I hated coffee.
Coffee and beer were the two things about adulthood I knew that, unlike everything else about adults, I understood.
Most of adult life was a mystery.
What are jobs? Why don’t my parents let me stay up late and eat ice cream every night? Why don’t they watch cartoons all day?
Coffee and beer were understandable: they tasted terrible. One sip, provided to me as a deterrent, and I made up my mind. Open and shut case.
But the most important thing about adulthood that you can’t understand as a child is compromise.
As the brightest minds of our generation have pondered on reddit:
Most of adulthood is spent saying “fuck this” while doing it anyway from r/Showerthoughts
A day job is the quintessence of that compromise.
If the only two things I knew about adult life were things I didn’t like, I was gonna have a bad time with “A Job”.
The two things I knew about adult life I hated. Ironically, they would become two of the best things about being an adult.
Child-me could not comprehend that the magnitude with which life would hit me would render the things I despised, into the things I most prized.
I never wanted to drink coffee, or have a day job.
Now I’m super grateful for both.
It Is Supposedly a Benefit To You, but Actually…
Free coffee seems like the company you work for is giving you something as a benefit, kind of like healthcare.
In theory, it SOUNDS great:
- Work for us and we’ll give you free coffee and pay for your hospital bill when you get hurt or sick.
- This will help you as an employee because the health care, just like the coffee, makes you feel better when you’re not feeling good.
In practice, it’s more like:
- Large corporations work tirelessly behind the scenes to lobby against universal healthcare
- because they know universal healthcare would make it easier for employees to leave shitty jobs.
Big Corporations know that healthcare untethered from employment means the balance of power between Employer and Employee shifts, even if it shifts ever so slightly.
These corporations are really greedy people, and really greedy people hate ever-so-slight shifts of power that don’t benefit them.
As soon as people aren’t fearing for their life, it turns out, they don’t want to work the shittiest jobs in the world for wages they can’t afford to live on.
In its insidious nature, the healthcare and free coffee are similar in that both actually benefit the employer more than the employee: the free coffee is there to make you more productive AND ensure you don’t have to leave the building to get your fix.
You Try To Choose The Pot With The Most Amount of Coffee So You Don’t Have to Refill It
One day you’re just doing your job like everyone else. All of a sudden, a random task that no one else wants seems to find its way to you.
The same thing goes for the coffee pot.
If there is more than one coffee canister in your work’s break room, you have to try and guess which one has more coffee in it so you can pour your cup without having to refill anything.
Avoiding extra work is the American – and corporate – way.
It’s not our fault, it’s the nature of humans.
- People who tend to take on extra work,
- tend to be stuck doing that extra work
- while in no way being paid,
- or appreciated, more.
In fact, in corporate America, nothing is punished more routinely than offering to help.
Jump into the fray and offer to assist with the difficult task no one else is taking on? Now it’s yours forever, and your fault that it’s not already done by the time you get it.
No one remembers the past.
All they know is YOUR NAME next to CODE RED BAD THING.
Congratulations.
All that other stuff you need to do? No one will cut you a break on it just because you took on more work.
Now, making a pot of coffee is easier than whatever Helen in accounting just handed you, but there is still some pressure there.
Everyone’s watching, waiting, ready to judge as soon as you make one little mistake because, come on? How hard is it to make a pot of coffee?
I have a method.
The pots in my break room are the industrial kind, big metal and plastic cylinders with a lever on top.
You push lever, it give coffee.
I’ve noticed that the pots whose levers are drooping, not propped up as stiffly as in the picture above, tend to be the pots with the lowest pressure and therefore (maybe?) have the least coffee in them.
That’s all I got.
A semi-maybe-helpful tip about how not to refill your break room coffee canister as long as your work uses the exact same canisters as mine.
And that, is our final lesson for the day: we should give each other breaks and pass along small tidbits of truth to help each other through a world we neither created nor asked for.
We are all in this together, so make that pot of coffee for the next person, but understand if they JUST. FUCKING. CANNOT today.