Many professions have a specific beverage stereotype they're known for. For athletes maybe it's Gatorade, Propel, or some other electrolyte drink. For fishing it's beer, for teaching it's wine. Queens (and certain starship captains) drink tea (perhaps Earl Grey?). For software developers it's Mountain Dew, but for anyone who knows me you know that it's coffee for me.
We go through a large amount of coffee in my house. We have a monthly subscription to 5lbs of whole bean coffee. We often have to supplement this with additional coffee from the grocery store, but in my defense I have some help from my family. Because of our ... habit ... we always have a couple spare bags of coffee in the pantry and we keep two large storage tins full of coffee on the counter, ready-to-grind.
So one fateful morning I stumbled downstairs to make the first morning cup of Joe, groggily thinking through the next few parts of my day. I had a couple client meetings, some code to write, but before all that I had an online presentation for an overseas conference.
I dumped out the used coffee grounds, cleaned the coffee maker and pot, refilled the water, and then went to run the grinder, but it was empty. No matter, I opened the first storage tin. Empty. Second storage tin. Also empty.
At this point I'm annoyed. I'm not awake yet and I have things to do and just want this first coffee of the day so that I can feel human again. I go into the pantry and find that the 5lb bag of beans is empty. The shelf that always contains backup coffee? Empty. I search high and low and there was no coffee anywhere in the house.
At that point I screamed bloody murder and made my partner run out to the local coffee shop for an emergency coffee for my presentation. Then he went out to the grocery store to get more beans but to make this whole horror story worse, the first grocery store was totally out of coffee beans and he had to go to another store. I feel like the universe was out to get me that day.
