Coffee machines

I have what you might call an addictive personality. I started smoking when I was seventeen, and I only stopped sixteen years and many tens of thousands of cigarettes later (and that more or less by accident - but I'll save that for another blog). During that same period I also drank quite a bit. The other day I saw a program in which a Motown mogul asked a sample audience whether they would spend their last money on a sandwich or on the single they had just heard. Some years ago, in my case, my answer might have been on a drink. 

Nowadays, I go for the socially much more acceptable addictions of coffee and chocolate. Now the reason that coffee and chocolate are more acceptable is that the side effects are much less harmful for society, and for the addict as well. Although ... (and this is why I am writing about this) ... this morning, rushed and stressed, I decided to get coffee from the machine instead of going down to the cafeteria. The machine I got it from has the bad habit of dispensing a plastic spoon into the cup before the coffee. Six times out of ten, however, the spoon misses the cup and slips through the grill underneath, where it lies with other such spoons like so many bones in a graveyard. And two times out of ten it lands in such a way as to obstruct the cup from taking it rightful place on the grill, leaving it askew and incapable of receiving the much-desired black goo that subsequently dissolves in the hot water that is then poured on top. That is what happened this morning. And of course - rushed and stressed and with coffee withdrawal symptoms (even if only imagined) as I was - I tried to quickly force the cup into place. My fingers were just in time to deflect most of hot water into the drain below. So in the end I not only did not have any coffee, I had succeeded in hurting my pride as well as my fingers. 

Only goes to show ...