Another day in the Silicon Valley... here we are, in the office of a computer science startup that shall stay anonymous. We just got a new coffee machine, actually, the n-th one in a series of new coffee machines, our office manager being under the influence of a coffee machine broker who desperately wants us to buy one of his devices. We keep sending the machines back, because they are usually not respectful of the environment enough, with all those little coffee bags or K-cups that you have to insert and then throw away each time you make a cup of coffee. There was a machine we all liked, that would grind the coffee beans on the spot instead of relying on wasteful little bags, but it was too expensive. Too bad, it was a programmable device, and some in the office had enough time on their hands to start hacking into it and commandeer it to produce unbelievably strong espressos.
Anyway, the latest machine we are trying out uses plastic “K-cups”, that you have to insert, and remove, yourself. That is... we have lots of very smart people at the company, and some have even figured out that they can insert the K-cup themselves, but let others remove it for them! I was particularly annoyed with that, so this morning I sent an email to the whole gang asking if they could please clean up after themselves. I sent that email around 9 am, and at 10 am, I was back at the coffee machine for another Colombian Black Gold Extra Bold, and lo and behold, a French Vanilla K-cup, used of course, was there in the machine! I tried again at 11 am, and another K-cup (still French Vanilla) was in there, used again! So, people just didn’t care about my email. My take on that trivial episode is that people don’t care about being polite, or that I have a different notion of what it means to be social and polite. Geeks are not known to be a polite kind, after all. In my darker moments, I interpret the incident to mean that some are taking advantage of the fact that we are not looking for fingerprints on those K-cups to express their darker side, Shadow as Jung would call it. I'm glad they are not repressed. Sigh. Whatever.
