Tag: coffee

Fun with Electricity! (Also Coffee and the Bust of the Year)

Heat wave + 3-day weekend = way too much hot air trying to sneak into the server room. Extra measures are being taken to ensure that the server AC can keep things cool, but I’m probably going to spend much of the weekend worrying about getting a “Server X down” SMS.

Brownout during lunchtime. I was at the Spectrum food court. All the lights flickered off and back on, and the muzak went silent for just a second. Twice. Here at work, most of the desktop machines rebooted. (Servers, of course, are on UPS.)

Coffee Crisis! Coffee maker at work shut off this morning just a few cups in. Determined that the power outlet had gone dead. Tried plugging it into another outlet, via extension cord + power strip. Power strip started buzzing, then circuit breaker tripped. Further analysis of coffee maker’s plug identified melted, cracked plastic. The company we lease it from can’t send out a replacement ’til Tuesday.

So, only 3 cups of coffee for the entire office. No gladiatorial combat, oddly enough. Though I did joke that it must be a fiendish plot by the cafe downstairs to sell more coffee.

Bust of the Century: Yesterday afternoon, got onto the 405 and immediately got stuck in traffic. Turned out to all be rubbernecking from something going on by the side of the road, where police were searching a stopped car. Lots of them. At least 5 squad cars, from at least 2 different cities, and a sheriff’s car.

Current Location: work

Oh, THAT Coffee!

I just took my travel mug into the lunch room to wash it out.  It was oddly heavy.  Now I know why I felt so sluggish this morning.  It wasn’t just a crash following the fix-the-most-heavily-used-server-now adrenaline high. I’d only drunk 1/3 my usual amount of coffee!

Christmas Coffee Calypso

I’d forgotten about it overnight, but today was the office building’s annual holiday party. This means that they set up a cappuccino cart, a pastry/fruit tray, and a calypso band playing Christmas songs on steel drums and a keyboard out in front of the building. (There’s also one in summer, not connected with any holidays, with smoothies instead.)

I just grabbed a plate, since I was carrying a travel mug of coffee from home, and the line for coffee was about 5 times as long. Unfortunately this meant I had extra food, which I forgot to put in the refrigerator. Not a problem for the raisin bread, but the yogurt’s probably toast. Oh, well…

Ended up grabbing a chai at Starbucks after lunch (and reminding myself why I usually don’t get chai there), which led to a conversation in the elevator with someone who works on the same floor. This was unusual on several accounts, since I don’t always take the elevator and when I do, I rarely talk with anyone beyond “What floor?”

Work itself involved a lot of frustration, a tale that I’ll have to tell in another post.

The curse be broken!

Fer th’ last three trips t’ Starbuccaneers, I ordered me the same brew, blended with ice. The scurvy dogs arsked me an I wanted whipped cream atop me drink, and every time, I replied, “No, thanks.”

Yet every time, me drink, it had whipped cream atop it!

This were three different houses of coffee, scuppering the same drink i’ th’ same manner!

It’s enough to make a pirate want to walk th’ plank hisself!

But today, aye, at yet a fourth tavern, were the barkeeps listenin’! Today, I had me a drink without whipped cream!

Methinks I oughter have tipped ’em an extra piece of eight!

Sweet poison

Woke up with a sore throat this morning, almost certainly the same thing Katie’s been fighting all week, so I’ve been drinking tea today. Our lunch room at work has a basket of sugar, Sweet-n-low, and Equal packets which someone has thoughtfully arranged in three wide stripes, making it look oddly like the French tricolor.

When the receptionist cleans the coffee maker, she puts a post-it note on the urn labeled “Poison,” often with a skull and crossbones, to make sure that no one absent-mindedly pours himself a cup of cleaning fluid. (And face it, if you really need the coffee, you won’t notice!)

Disturbingly, someone had set that post-it note on top of the sugar packets.

Now, I’m sure you can find nutritionists, dietitians, and the occasional conspiracy theorist who will agree with that assessment—and throw in aspartame and saccharin as well—but it’s not a label you want to see on something you’re about to put in your own drink. Even when you know it’s safe!

Sleeeeeeep

Up too late repeatedly this week. (What else is new?) Tuesday night it was writing down ideas for a joke website (which will remain nameless until it’s a bit further along). Sometimes when I’m trying to go to sleep my mind will start writing. Often it’ll be some rant about something that’s been bugging me, or sometimes it’ll be about something I found interesting, or an email to send someone, or ideas for my website. The problem is that I generally don’t pick these up again the next day, and I had some good ideas. I’m still kicking myself for completely forgetting what I was absolutely convinced would be a great stand-alone website idea, so obvious I wouldn’t have to write it down, and… well, I should have written it down.

So Tuesday night I got up and wrote stuff down.

And last night I finished the taxes. I’d done a rough draft a few weeks ago, just to confirm we were getting a refund that could significantly finance our vacation, but put off finishing the federal taxes and doing the state taxes, which are usually simpler… only the rules about deducting interest paid on student loans are different. CA only lets you deduct interest payments during the first 60 months of repayment, and I graduated in 1999, so I had to track down exactly when the loan went into repayment in order to figure out whether I could deduct the whole amount, or whether I had to estimate 11 months, 10 months, etc. In the end I had to run everything through another 1-page worksheet that exactly cancelled out the decuction, so it didn’t really matter when the 60-month cutoff date fell.

Sometimes I think tax preparers must have lobbyists in Congress and at the state level, trying to make sure the forms are as complicated as possible. I know it’s mostly about incentives, encouraging or rewarding certain types of behavior, but taking a different cut from every type of income seems a bit extreme.

Anyway, about a half hour ago I realized I was staring dumbly at the monitor here. The energy rushes from morning, breakfast, and lunch had each worn off, and when I finally got around to heading for the lunch room I was very glad to find there was still coffee. (I can’t even remember the last time I had work coffee.) It reminds me, actually, of college, when the class I was most likely to fall asleep in was generally the one mid-afternoon. Of course, now that I think about it, the only classes I can remember sleeping in on a regular basis were Early American Literature (with the exception of Ben Franklin’s autobiography, it was a slog) and, a class on Old English. It doesn’t fit the pattern, because it was mid-morning, and the subject was fascinating. And I really hated falling asleep in there, because aside from the interesting subject matter, it was a 10-person class held around a conference table in a tiny office.

Well, I guess it’s back to battling with server hardware.

Current Mood: 😴sleepy
Current Music: does the jet engine on my desk count?