Technology is Not Your Friend

Technology doesn’t like me – at least not this week. It started with PowerPoint on my work laptop acting up and closing whenever I tried to save a file, or sometimes just switching slide views. Our IT group was going to take a look at it on Monday and give me a loaner but I was too busy to take my laptop next door. Then on Tuesday they were swamped and too busy. All the time I’m still working on presentations and proposals and nursing “the machine” along. I spent most of the day Wednesday working on a proposal only to discover at the end of the workday that the manual “Save As” function wasn’t working on my PowerPoint and my last two hours of work was lost. I spent that much of my evening on my home computer trying to reconstruct from memory what was lost. All’s well that ends well and I got the proposal finished today.

But yesterday morning my lowly, low-tech coffee maker tried to do me in. First thing this morning before shaving I grabbed the glass pot and poured the last three-quarter cup of cold coffee left over from the day before. I don’t mind reheating day-old coffee in a microwave – I like the idea of not wasting it and many brands reheat quite well (some do not I’ve discovered). Now my sister has proudly adopted the “Life is too short to reheat coffee” stance. Fine for her, she’s a successful veterinarian with her own practice. I’m… well not a veterinarian and we’ll just leave it at that.

Meanwhile, back at the kitchen… after pouring that three-quarters cup I washed out the empty glass pot and left it on the edge of the sink to drain. What I didn’t notice was my wife had pre-loaded the coffee maker the night before and set the timer to go off at some prescribed time in the morning. After heating my cup in the microwave I immediately went upstairs to shave. In my absence the timer went off and the coffee maker did what it was designed to do, only without a pot to collect all that resultant wonderful liquid. When I came back down into the kitchen my 10 cups of morning coffee, along with assorted grounds, had formed a nice puddle on my counter, running down the cabinet and forming a caffeine river along my floor. Oh man. While my laptop software causes me to mutter various dispersions against the Bill Gates Company, I wasn’t saying very nice things about Mr. Coffee either. Of course, the coffee flood was my own fault – I guess. But you know that “Auto” light on the coffee maker indicating the timer has been set is pretty darn small. Ultimately this incident must be the fault of some dang industrial engineer in Cincinnati, or Austin, or maybe Beijing. Yeah, probably Beijing.