Thursday, November 23, 2006

Coffee machines

This morning I experienced a coffee machine (or rather an espresso maker) at work. I love espresso so I was thrilled. I had these buttons to chose from:


What will you get when pressing the button on the right? My guess was something with milk in it (and I expected the button on the left to give me something cappuccino-like (because of the foam on the top)) - I therefore pressed the middle one. With two cups set behind each other (there was also one with two milky cups behind each other). I was therefore slightly confused and quite embarrassed when the quite normal, and very un-espresso like, coffee floated in large quantities over the edge of the cup. Afterwards I was told by a friendly colleague that the "milk" button would have given me my espresso and the "double-milk" the desired double espresso. This was after I had struggled with the error message from the nice display which told me to refill the water tank but gave absolutely no instructions how to do this. Later on I was also prompted to empty some sort of tray (and again had to ask a colleague for help). Why, I ask myself, do they not use the nice display to tell me more precisely what to do (or rather how to do it)? Granted, the display was not big - but it was big enough to accommodate an arrow pointing in the direction of the water tank (or the tray).

While on the coffee machine track: At work we have another type of coffee machine. Actually there are two kinds but they look identical; one uses grind coffee the other uses whole beans and grinds them on the way to cup. Otherwise they are identical. Well, except that they switched the two top rows which means that when you start the morning getting your first cup of coffee (all bleary eyed) you accidentally get (what they call) espresso but is really nothing more than regular coffee with less water when you expect regular coffee. Why did they switch the top rows?

And finally: impressive how many permutations drink can come from 3 powders (coffee, milk and chocolate) and hot water.