[Suggestion: Read the essay entitled, “Coffee Manager”, which appeared in Lokvani on Nov. 4, 2002.]

I was not joking, the exemption that I took as regards my coffee drinking habits at the office (the lack thereof, really) which I described in my last essay happens to be real. As a matter of fact, that was one of my new year resolutions of yesteryear. I had resolved a few years back that I will not drink office coffee for as long as I live. Now, have I not made other new year resolutions before? Yes. And have I kept them? Not really! Most of my resolutions lasted about a couple of weeks, and were promptly broken by the time MLK Birthday rolled around in mid-January. A few others got a little better mileage, but they too never lasted beyond the Presidents’ Day. But when it came to this one about the office coffee, there was a major difference. It was a keeper. It was a life and death situation of sorts. It was a long time ago…….

It happened about nine years back. I was on an extended assignment at one of our Nuclear Power stations. My Corporate days of shirt and tie and the 9 to 5 work schedule were simply faint memories of the past. My formals became blue jeans, T shirt and work boots, and on an occasional casual day, I would wear my sneakers! On a good day, I could sit down at my desk for about 15 minutes and eat a sandwich, although on most other days, it’s lunch on the run. If I remember correctly, most everybody, including the “Coffee Manager”, was out during the Christmas and New Year holidays, and only a handful of us were left at the office. This necessitated that one of us do the honors, and as usual, I was volunteered (the passive voice is intentional) to be the “Guy in Charge” of coffee. Well, since I was volunteered, I decided to have the dubious distinction of fetching the water from the bathroom in the old yellow jugs, although I probably could have delegated that responsibility to my assistant manager, but there was a problem: There was no assistant manager! If there were one, I hadn’t seen him, because he too was probably on vacation! So, off I go to the men’s room with the milk jugs in tow.

Before filling the jugs, I thought I would give them a quick rinse, since I thought that was one of the many chores which the coffee manager normally was supposed to do in the mornings. But what I didn’t realize until then was that the old yellow milk jugs were not really yellow at all! They simply appeared yellow to the casual observer, that’s all! The color was only in the eyes of the beholder! In reality, they had been made of clear plastic at some point in their life cycle. This became more and more obvious to me when I held the jugs under the faucet for a few seconds. First, the dirty yellow color of the jugs changed to a dirty mud color, soon to be followed by a plain mud color. I poured out the water into the sink, which also turned into a dirty mud color. A few minutes later, I heard reports on the radio that the color of the water in the Tennessee River also followed suit, similar to the water of the Nile when Moses brought on the plagues on Ramses II and the rest of the Egyptian mummies (and daddies). I rinsed them again and again, with detergents this time, until the color finally stabilized, and settled on a yellowish grayish hue-ish (I mean hue). I’ll make a long story short. I made the coffee all right, but only for the rest of the coffee drinking proletariat. As far as I was concerned, that was it, baby! I was done!

Naturally, I stayed in the position of Acting Coffee Manager and discharged my duties for the rest of the holidays as a non-playing team player. I didn’t tell the regular coffee manager the reason why the jugs looked differently when he returned. He probably still thinks that I replaced them with new clear plastic milk jugs during the time when he was gone, and I, for one, was not going to disappoint my buddy. The bright side, now in hindsight, was that in the process, I saved 50 cents a day, 5 days a week! I put on my economist’s hat and calculated my long term savings, and it worked out to be $115.00 a year, or well over $1,000 in nine years. Taking into account inflation, that’s like saving $10,000 in 2002 dollars! Not a bad deal, wouldn’t you say?! Granted, the coffee was probably high octane, high propane, high performance, unleaded, super premium material, and would even have given me the caffeine fix that I needed on certain lousy afternoons, but it was downright unhygienic!

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