Coffee

I had to make an entry into the ‘Grievance Redressal System’ today.

I stumbled into the pantry with half-closed eyes desperately craving for that rejuvenating first-sip which will activate my eyelids to fully operational, kick-start my brain and make my senses observe the world clearly again.

I put my cup under the general area of the dispenser, pressed the ‘Espresso’ button through muscle memory… and… there was a power outage. S-word!

That activated a ‘fight or flight’ area of my brain which has evolved over the millennia to face such situations. I mean, what did the hunter-gatherer do when he realized in the morning that he had run out of the coffee-fruits he had gathered? He obviously couldn’t go hunting without having a few? The huntress has been needing way too many ever since the little baby huntress was born!

Ok, let’s go to the upstairs pantry; F-word, that would be out too! The cafeteria? That B-word vendor hasn’t been coming all this week!

Calm down! Breathe deeply. Say ‘Ooooohhhmmmm’; let go of all resistance. Breathe in from one nostril, breathe out of another… but even this is only possible AFTER coffee! Should I go out to Adyar Ananda Bhavan 3km down the road? Oh D-word, I take the office cab these days. F-word carbon-credits, I should start driving again!

Power hadn’t come back. I slowly started trudging back to my desk, turned my chair around and was half way through sitting on it when the power came back. I had to trudge back to the pantry and wait for the machine to stop saying ‘Please wait… initializing’ for five minutes before I could get my coffee.

Suggestion to admin department is that the coffee machine should be connected to the UPS. After all it is life-giving fluid somewhere between ‘Wi-fi’ and ‘Water’ on Maslow’s Pyramid of needs.