Pick a drink, milk and sugar are optional. Insert a coin, press a couple of buttons and bingo it arrives. It’s a straightforward way of getting from A to B. Expectations are relative to the ability of the machine to mix water and powder at a desirable temperature and present it in a plastic beaker. As long as I don’t expect a glass of Bollinger to emerge, I will be happy enough with my purchase.
Fifty cents or thereabouts moderate my expectations to a level coherent with the machine’s ability to deliver. Perhaps when a while ago some UK consumers were horrified to find out their £1 pack of 10 frozen burgers contained some horse, they could have done worse than look to the coffee machine for lessons. It wouldn’t have a view on the morals of carnism, economic incentives or why cow milk can legally contain up to 400 million pus cells/litre, it would remain steadfast in its narrow remit of acceptable coffee production stating silently over and over again that this is what 50 cents or thereabouts buys you right here right now.
Coffee machine functionality is a wonderful thing. It is binary at almost every turn and requires no input of personal data, no cookies – that’s a different machine altogether, it has only one error message; ‘out of order’, and almost without fail delivers a beaker of piping hot coffee within realistic parameters of quality.
As a means of escaping the drudgery of work, the coffee vending machine serves as a meeting point for colleagues who gather at the office/factory oasis for some respite from the tedium of whatever brought them there. Beyond simply providing a break, its benefits extend to a bit of leg stretching for the sedentary and some human interaction and relationship building within the workplace. It may well be that the coffee machine has done more for team building than paintball or any other HR cliché could ever aspire. Pouring hot liquid over a colleague or assaulting them at the coffee machine is most likely a sackable offence whereas shooting them with a compressed air propelled ball of paint is positively in the spirit of the unpaid weekend commandeered by human resources. Like the arming of peasants in a civil war, it is often hard to distinguish how much of the ensuing violence is in the spirit of the conflict/exercise and how much is owed to pre-existing grudges and the settling of accounts. Wherever coffee machines exist, they do so within the rules and protocols that predate their arrival. They also limit the scope for being hit by a paint filled projectile camouflaged as team-building.
Another quality of the coffee vending machine is that it doesn’t follow you back to your workplace encouraging you to check your social media. More importantly still it doesn’t accompany you home demanding constant attention to the exclusion of real people in the here and now. This quality cannot be overstated. In part this is down to the bulky size of the machine but also with coffee making relatively affordable and a simple task to master, most homes have access to coffee which is many factors better than the workplace machine. Its merits are as much in what it doesn’t do as what it actually can.
The narrow logic that governs coffee vending machine functionality is its strongest suit. It makes no promise it can’t fulfil, offers no suggestions on what you might like to go with your coffee, and gives no unnecessary information on the provenance of the beverage or fluctuations in coffee prices on the world markets. It makes no false undertakings and no amount of money will buy a better cup with its unbending Warhol-esque approach to maintaining standards.
All of this is in contrast with the daily lottery of what our digital devices purport to offer. All programmes should come with a ‘Do it for me’ setting and an ‘I know what I’m doing’ choice. Don’t judge me for it but I have other interests and were computers not so necessary today, I’d be questioning whether they are worth the stress. There is something reassuring in the analogue pulleys, levers and steam power of the coffee vending machine. If it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work and there’s no link to a forum or any message reading;
Error: vbjnevh8765164/////wtfef7t735#// Accept?
Only a high ranking nerd might know what that means. Some choice. Give me your first born? Give me strength.
I pine for the clunky, stationary buttons of the coffee machine when my computer screen jumps to make room for an emerging advert and the place I clicked is now an ad for vitamins. This guarantees a week or two’s bombardment of my inbox with ‘personalised’ ads of a similar kind. Come to think of it, perhaps I do feel a bit anaemic after all. Besides gambling habits, the assumption seems to be that I also have an insatiable need for porn as my sense of being shafted is graphically illustrated by hot teens who apparently like it hard.
Give me consistency so I’m faced with things familiar to me and my login page is the same from one day to the next. Stop moving the icons about like supermarkets do products. Give me a programme that just asks if I’m happy to leave it to the 0s & 1s to assemble whatever it is I’m after and I’ll happily click ok.
Voice control when it becomes the norm may help as long as it understands ducking hell isn’t an avoidance of purgatory, tucks are rarely given, I’m not always game for a spot of shopping and it won’t pimp me out to internet commerce and data harvesters.
Wanting simple choices and simplicity is not the simpleton choice; it’s the choice of someone with other interests. You don’t need to know how the internal combustion engine works to drive or how plumbing works to shower. Sure it might help if you’re a hands on, fix it type of person but most of us aren’t and we just want to get where we’re going happily outsourcing that knowledge to others.
I like the binary simplicity of coffee machine logic though admittedly the coffee they produce could be improved on.
