S1E10: Office Coffee

?? Today we are going to talk about bad office coffee. ??

?? Fair warning: This article includes swearing and also mention of bowel movements. If reading about poop disturbs you, this might not be for you.

If you are one of the millions of people who find it cathartic to discuss shitting, then read on. You are my people.

?? One of the bright spots coming out of The Covid is that most people who are reporting to a brick-and-mortar don’t have to deal with shitty office coffee anymore. Most companies have put the kibosh on any community food- or drink-related items.

But someday the office break room will come back. And it is for this reason that I raise these words of caution (consider this your Office Coffee Public Service Announcement for the day). ??

Back when I reported to an office I had to stop drinking the break-room coffee…because it gave me (ahem) intestinal distress. ??

Each floor in our headquarters had a break room and most of them had a Coffee Club. We paid 35-cents for a cuppa joe and it wasn’t the best coffee in the world. Our 4th-floor admin “Gina” managed the supplies and she wasn’t exactly purchasing high-end stuff.

This was not her fault.

??Even at only $ .35 a cup, we had a lot of moochers. Gina sent out emails every few months, reminding all the deadbeats to pay up for the coffee they’d “borrowed.” The club wasn’t swimming in money, so the coffee came mainly from the local bulk store.

Nevertheless, for most of us it was affordable and convenient. For many years I got my daily juice from the break room. When you don’t particularly love coffee in the first place (because it tastes like battery acid) and additionally you find yourself drinking not the crème of the crop, you find ways to compensate.

?? My “way” was a packet of hot chocolate in every cup.

It wasn’t the healthiest alternative, but just as we put bacon bits in our salad to help us choke down the nasty, bitter vegetables, sometimes we have to put something in our coffee to do the same. ??

I drank Coffee Club coffee for many moons.

?? Until…something changed.

One day our normal bulk-store Maxwell House filter-brew packets were replaced with something new. I have no idea what brand it was. It was nothing I recognized.

If memory serves, the Maxwell House either increased in price or was no longer available in the bulk store, so Gina had to find an alternative. Hence the no-one-ever-heard-of-it brand.

I didn’t think anything of it because I always had my brown battery acid blessed by the goddess Swiss Miss. I didn’t really notice anything different other than the packaging.

Oh. It was most definitely different.???

As soon as we made the switch, suddenly, every day, I’m in the ladies’ room with Mud Butt.

(FYI: Mudd Butt is the official medical term).

?? And it wasn’t just your runs of the mill loose deuce. No, this was the very gaseous variety. I would be in the bathroom stall squeezing my buns together to try and let it out quietly. You know what I’m talking about. If you don’t squeeze, it sounds like a Mack truck going over rumble strips on the freeway. ??

I’m not embarrassed by natural bodily functions, but nor do I want everyone to hear my gut explosion. This is a workplace, after all. I’m just trying to be polite and discrete.

Side note: Regarding "polite and discrete"...if someone is talking on their cell phone in the next stall, then all bets are off; I’m going full cannon. Talking on cellphones in public restrooms is just annoying and I will fart, cough, clear my throat, shuffle my feet, anything to disrupt the conversation. ??

After a couple weeks of regular bouts with The Flux, I made the correlation that the Coffee Club coffee was the cause of my chocolate thunder, so I gave in and started buying the expensive stuff down in the cafeteria. They had a separate coffee bar where you could get smoothies and lattes and mochas, and they used higher-end coffee.

?? Sure enough, once I switched to the coffee bar coffee, I was no longer doing the cheap-coffee boot-scoot boogie every morning.

My husband Sean thought I was nuts. He did not believe it was the coffee. I mean…coffee is coffee, right? It’s all the same stuff.

Then one day he brought home some Mexican-blend K-cups, which I happened to love. Nowadays I’m snobbing it up with a French press and locally roasted organic beans, but back then I would do K-cups at home on the weekends. And the Mexican blend was fabulous. ??????

Not so fabulous for Sean, however.

He took his Mexican-blend K-cups to work, and just as I had experienced with the Coffee Club coffee…he also found himself in the men’s room every morning about an hour after drinking his first cuppa joe. And, like me, he was having intestinal blow-ups that he described as “a civil war battle.” ??

I felt vindicated. There IS a difference. Why did the Mexican-blend K-cups not cause my gut to explode? I don’t know. The same reason why I can drink just about every brand or type of coffee, but the really cheap and crappy stuff puts me on the throne in the fetal position with my ass being ripped apart.

???? A lot of office coffee is the cheap and crappy stuff.

Sorry, not sorry…it just is.

Maybe some companies are just cheap in general. Maybe some of them have to deal with a bunch of mooching deadbeats that never pay up, so their fund runs dry.

Plus (and this is difficult to even think about, even for someone like me who freely and easily talks about the backdoor trots)…how often do those office coffee machines get cleaned out?  Is the cleaning staff (or somebody!) purging those units with some good cleaner and disinfectant once in a while? Especially those big machines that are integrated and attached to a water source. God only knows what’s growing inside of those beasts. ??

Be afraid. Be very afraid. ??

There.

I believe my work here is done. Don’t say you haven’t been warned and don’t blame me if you let yourself be drawn into bad office coffee, lulled by the caffeine, only to find yourself on the toilet an hour later squeezing your buns together. Just sayin’.

??For some additional comments about office coffee from the LinkedIn tribe, check out related posts Office Coffee - Pleasant perk or liquid death? and Story Time with Hoodie2Shoes.

All right Grit Shitsters, thanks for stopping by!

Don’t forget to follow #cafegrit here on LinkedIn and check out the Café Grit Podcast for more real conversations about corporate life, careers, the quest for fulfillment, and finding your voice (links below). Please leave a review on the platform of your choice if you think it doesn’t suck!

You can also find more information and more discussion in our private Facebook Group Café Grit. I’d love to hear your comments, questions, suggestions for future topics, or corrections (except for the Grammar police…you all can just keep your damn mouths shut, no one wants to hear from you).

And check out Where The Hell Is My Bacon: How An Innocent Pork Product Conquered Employee Engagement And Change Management At A Large Midwestern Corporation for the true story of how one stressed-out IT department found their voice through bacon.

That’s all for now, we’ll talk to you soon…and remember: You don’t have to deal with the bullshit, and there IS something better out there. Let’s figure it out together.

Take it easy. ???? ???? ???? ??