The Beverage Dictator...

[msfledermaus]

...It's not even a scheduled workday for the guy, and yet the Beverage Dictator's on the loose, running around and complaining there's no coffee for him to make. *grumble*

The Beverage Dictator's kind of our resident employed crazy-guy...been here 30 years, and he knows how to make coffee, sure does, much better than you ever could!! Don't argue with him! Nobody appreciates all the coffee he makes for people!!! The coffee is always Folgers out of a can, and there's just something special he adds to the process that makes his coffee taste...bad...really just bad. It's that special cigarrete-butts taste of truly bad coffee that really does it for me. It's the beverage of last resort for caffeine-starved guards around here at the Jade Mines...

For a while I made the mistake of bringing in a little coffee of my own to make--a bunch of us were working early morning shifts, and we needed some decent coffee to get us going.
I'd come back from a break and find that the French Roast I'd only had a cup of had disappeared--and that the pot was full of Folgers again. The Beverage Dictator dumped out my coffee over and over until I learned to be a sneak and just make coffee on his days off...but not even the days off are really truly safe. Is the nice Chocolate Mocha-flavored coffee brought in by the morning captain going to be drunk up by happy and relieved early-morning people? Or is the Beverage Dictator going to srike? Only the mad roulette wheel of the Beverage Dictator's mind can really say...

But today, there is no coffee to make. The Beverage Dictator is muttering about going to the store to buy some more Folgers so he can have some coffee. At Work. On his day off...

I think I'll stick to tea today.:)

Comments

[halfmoon-mollie.livejournal.com]

There is nothing so truly terrible as bad coffee. Weak bad coffee, strong bad coffee, bad coffee is bad coffee. And the burnt cigarette-butt taste is a perfect description I think.

For a little while, I made the coffee in here. We were provided with Maxwell House, so that's what I made. I cleaned the pot at the end of the week, and did all that good stuff. But I stopped because I got complaints when the coffee was gone and it was time to make a new pot, or complaints about how the coffee was bad why couldn't we something besides Maxwell House, etc etc. etc. I lost patience and got rid of our coffee pot.

Tea sounds like a good idea, dear.

[msfledermaus.livejournal.com]

I like being self-sufficient in the caffeine department:)

and it's hard to be the Beverage Person at work..I had to do it for a while as a change in my job description, and I hated it so...

[mcohenmn.livejournal.com]

If the Dictator can get into the break room on his day off, your physical security systems may be insufficient. I'm a big believer in magnetic passes tied to systems that know when people should be allowed into specific areas.

[thedarkages]

Being intimately acquainted with card-based access control systems due to a past stint at Infographics (now GE Security), my guess is that the Jade Mines would never spring for a fine-grained access control system like Diamond II. I also can imagine the bureaucratic battle to add an access point to the break room.

[msfledermaus.livejournal.com]

...Plus so many of our staff work last-minute overtime, it would be tricky to police it. We do police it fairly thouroughly, as far as it goes, with magnetic badges for certain areas that are sensitive...just the breakroom is a low-security area...and so is our poor long-suffering coffee machine:)

It's okay, just kind of annoying first thing in the morning. The guy doesn't really have anything else other than his job. We all try to walk that line between understanding and annoyance...

[thedarkages]

The card reader would not be overly expensive; replacing the lock with an electrically actuated one, extending the wiring, adding a new controller if the loop is new -- those things might cost.

As for last-minute overtime, as of 2001, Infographics was putting in a special "extend hours" button that would add 30 minutes to an employee's shift (i.e., give the employee 30 more minutes during which his or her card worked). They may have moved it to custom integration. In any case, you need a full-time guard to manage the console and deal with requests.

I can't believe I used to think about this stuff all the time, but it was a job that paid well. I was laid off in the first week of September, 2001; Infographics had just secured a massive bid to provide the new security system for the World Trade Center. A couple of days later...

[msfledermaus.livejournal.com]

A lot of our locks work on something similar--I won't go into detail, but a lot of our people have to check in with a real human being before they can enter...we're not told to keep him out, so he gets in. *uncomfortable shrug*

wow, cool that you know about that kind of system, though...pity they laid you off.*shakes head*

[thedarkages]

Well, they didn't know what to do with me. I was originally a tech writer, but the lead programmer had a need for someone who knew XML, DHTML, and Javascript, so I got switched over to work on the product's user interface. The problem was that Microsoft's XML parser at the time was new, buggy, and incredibly slow. When the lead programmer got tired of that, he decided to write the user interface entirely using ActiveX/ATL controls within the browser; from that point, I was useless to him, since I didn't know C or C++. So, I was switched back to tech writing for a week, and then they laid me off.

[silentbob037.livejournal.com]

The coffee is always Folgers out of a can, and there's just something special he adds to the process that makes his coffee taste...bad...really just bad.

Maybe he spits in it before it starts to percolate...

[msfledermaus.livejournal.com]

Now I'm REALLY going to avoid his coffee.

[silentbob037.livejournal.com]

It would kind of explain the odd taste better than anything else that I can think of.

[mcohenmn.livejournal.com]

I forgot to mention my favorite coffee-related lyric - Ani DiFranco - "The coffee was just water dressed in brown"

[msfledermaus.livejournal.com]

Wow...that's a great lyric:)

[scentedwoods.livejournal.com]

Get yourselves and insualted thermos, brew your good coffee, fill the thermos and then hide it under the sink or something. You shouldn't have to drink butt-coffee!

[low-delta.livejournal.com]

He threw out your coffee? What an asshole!

Can you bring in another coffeemaker, so he can have his and you can have yours, our would he throw that away too?

[msfledermaus.livejournal.com]

Probably... Or just take it. He's just really mental. I just bring my own in my Mr. Tiki mug-thing or something. This guy is just realllllly messed up.

ghetto mocha

[daifu.livejournal.com]

We have packets of Caribou for our coffee maker. You'd think that'd be good right? But somehow it doesn't taste at all like Cairbou. Possibly it's the horrible Eden Prarie/Minnetonka filtration plant or something.

The only way it's palatable to me is to add a packet of Swiss Miss. This technique was introduced to me by PunkRockGirl who called it Ghetto Mocha. it does cut the burnt taste.

Lately the office people of a sub-company that's been co-habitating with us have been making DECAF in the regular pots. >.< The orange handle is there for a reason!