Before the pandemic, I worked at an office alongside about 50 people. We had a coffee machine in the break room and the coffee was just atrocious. It always tasted bitter and burned. We would bring our own ground coffee but it didn’t fix it, so we just figured that coffee machine was bad enough where it’d turn any coffee into shit-tasting brew. We tried to give that feedback through the suggestion box and through office manager, but it never got better. We then went to be remote for the pandemic and I ended up leaving that job when they called us back into the office.
My next job was fully remote, but I was expected to come to the head office across the country every few months or so. I make a trip there, the headquarters of a multi-billion dollar company, go to the break room, get some coffee and it tastes awful. Everyone laughs and says “Yup, it’s always been terrible”.
As a part of my new remote job, I had to visit a customer location for a project. I get there, their office building is beautiful and so is the office space. Probably the coziest looking office space I’d ever seen. I go to their kitchen, grab a paper cup and wait for the coffee machine to finish brewing, thinking I’m going to enjoy the fresh coffee. Pour myself a cup, taste it and almost spit it back out – it’s that bad.
You’d think in the post-pandemic times, the least they can do to draw people into the office is provide them with good tasting coffee to take them through the day. Why does the office coffee always so bad? Is it the coffee machines they buy or the water? Have you ever worked/been to an office where company-supplied coffee was the nectar of gods (hell, even passable) and not the foul-tasting witch brew?