I Was Just Trying to Make Coffee

Saturday morning began with a simple objective... Coffee.

That's it. I wasn't remodeling the kitchen. I wasn't installing solar panels. I wasn't attempting to teach myself conversational Mandarin before lunch. I just wanted some coffee. This should have required approximately four minutes and almost no critical thinking. Unfortunately, I own a house.

Houses have discovered something about their owners: we are easily distracted by minor defects. I walked toward the kitchen and noticed the picture hanging beside the hallway was crooked. Not badly crooked, mind you. Maybe three degrees if I were to guess. But once you see three degrees, you cannot unsee three degrees. So I stopped. I'll straighten that real quick.

Those six words have destroyed more Saturdays than alcohol. I nudged the frame slightly. Too far. Nudged it back. Still wrong. Apparently the nail had loosened. No problem, I'll get the hammer and fix that before you can spell "Home Improvement"...

The hammer lives in the junk drawer. Well, technically, nothing lives in the junk drawer. Things are sentenced there. I opened it. It opened approximately four inches before something inside wedged itself against the cabinet. In an area not visible to the naked eye, it would seem. I pulled harder. Nothing. I pushed it closed in hopes of unjarring whatever was... well, jarred. Now it wouldn't close either. Excellent. I had owned this problem for eleven seconds and had already made it worse.

After reaching through the opening like a veterinarian assisting a difficult calf, I discovered the obstruction. Batteries. Approximately seventeen batteries were rolling around loose inside the drawer.

AA.

AAA.

One enormous D battery I haven't used in an appliance since 1998. And a mysterious rectangular 9-volt battery that immediately transported me back to childhood, when determining whether a battery worked involved putting it against your tongue and briefly electrocuting your face. We were pioneers then.

I couldn't remember whether these batteries were good or dead. Fortunately, I own a battery tester. Unfortunately, I had no idea where it was.

Coffee status: not started.

Twenty minutes later I was in the garage. Why? Great question... I believe I went there looking for the battery tester, but by then I'd found a loose handle on the utility cabinet and was holding a Phillips screwdriver.

This is how the house gets you. Household chores don't occur individually. They reproduce, like Gremlins in water. Every task contains another smaller task inside it, like Russian nesting dolls designed by Home Depot.

You go outside to replace a porch bulb. You notice the gutter sagging. You get the ladder. The ladder has mud on it. You get the hose. The hose nozzle leaks. You go looking for plumber's tape. And six hours later you're standing in Lowe's holding a toilet flapper despite the fact that nothing was originally wrong with your toilet. This is adulthood, my friends.

It's an open-world video game where the main storyline has been abandoned, and nobody remembers the mission.

Eventually I found the battery tester. Back to the kitchen. Except now the coffee maker was blinking. Not the normal clock blinking. A different light. A little symbol I had never noticed before. This concerned me. I've owned this coffee maker for four years, but apparently it had been quietly withholding information.

Some appliance buttons become part of the scenery. You see them every day but never actually process their existence. My microwave has roughly 30 buttons. I use about four of them...

TIME.

3.

0.

START.

That's it. I could own the world's most technologically advanced microwave and never know it. There could be a button that teleports the lasagna directly into my stomach. I wouldn't have a clue, and at this point it wouldn't much matter.

The coffee maker's mysterious symbol looked vaguely like a water droplet negotiating a mortgage. So I did something nobody should ever have to do on a Saturday morning. I found the instruction manual.

Instruction manuals are extraordinary documents because they contain everything except the information you're looking for. The first six pages explain that electrical appliances should not be immersed in water. Yeah thanks... Had I not read that, I would have been moments away from brewing coffee in the bathtub. Two birds with one... pot??

Then comes the safety section.

• “Do not place appliance near open flame.”

• “Do not allow children to operate unattended.”

• “Do not insert foreign objects into reservoir.”

At this point I became curious about the legal cases that created these sentences. Somewhere, presumably, a man named Vernon tried to brew coffee using a screwdriver, a scented candle, and four unsupervised toddlers.

Page seven: diagram. The diagram appeared to have been drawn from memory by somebody who once saw a coffee maker through a bus window. Part A connects to Part G. Part G does not appear anywhere else in the manual.

An arrow points toward something called the Flow Distribution Assembly. I own this machine. I have never encountered a Flow Distribution Assembly. I'm beginning to suspect my coffee maker has organs. Then I found it. The blinking symbol meant:

DESCALING REQUIRED.

Of course. The machine wanted a spa day; why did I not see it before? I wanted caffeine. Apparently only one of us mattered. Unfortunately, humans are not born with service lights. More the pity...

This is the problem with modern appliances. They have become far too confident. My parents' washing machine had two knobs. One controlled water temperature. The other essentially offered:

WASH CLOTHES

or

WASH CLOTHES AGGRESSIVELY.

That machine lasted 31 years. My current washer has settings for Normal, Delicates, Bedding, Activewear, Sanitize, Deep Fill, Steam, Eco, Heavy Duty and something called Downloaded Cycle. Downloaded from WHERE? Why does my washing machine have downloadable content? Am I eventually going to receive an email? Congratulations! New Sock Expansion Pack available now!

I refuse to participate. NORMAL. Every time. I could be washing a silk kimono filled with roofing nails... NORMAL. The engineers spent nine years developing seventeen sophisticated fabric-care algorithms, and millions of us are standing there going: “Normal looks good.”

Cars are worse. My steering wheel has enough buttons to launch a lunar module. I know volume. I know cruise control. The remaining eleven are decorative as far as I'm concerned.

One depicts a face speaking toward three curved lines. I've never pressed it. I'm afraid I'll accidentally contact Sweden and be charged for roaming.

Eventually I completed the coffee maker's descaling ritual. It required vinegar, water, two cycles, one button held for five seconds and an emotional commitment I hadn't anticipated making before breakfast.

The light disappeared. Victory! I pressed BREW. Nothing happened. Pressed it again. Still nothing. Now the display said something I'd never seen before.

AUTO... Oh no. Apparently, during descaling, I had awakened another feature. I pressed the button beside AUTO. The clock changed. Pressed it again. A tiny bell appeared. Pressed another button. The machine beeped three times.

I had no idea what I'd done, but I was increasingly certain coffee would begin brewing automatically at 2:17 Wednesday morning.

This is precisely why we don't explore the buttons. People think humans fear technology. We don't. We fear settings. Settings have consequences. You press the wrong thing on an oven, and suddenly it says “SABBATH.” There is no obvious way back. You wanted 425 degrees. Now you've apparently entered into a binding theological agreement with your range.

So you do what humanity has done since the invention of consumer electronics. And, ironically, what every customer support team member has ever uttered to you, since the inception of said support...

Unplug it. Wait ten seconds. Plug it back in. This is our most successful technological achievement. We have artificial intelligence, quantum computing, and machines exploring Mars, but our primary repair methodology remains:

Have you tried briefly killing it?

At 11:43 A.M., I finally made coffee. I stood in the kitchen holding the mug with the satisfaction of a man who had crossed Antarctica on foot. Then I looked toward the hallway. The picture was still crooked. I had never gotten the hammer. The batteries were spread across the counter. The junk drawer was hanging open. A screwdriver was sitting beside the toaster. The battery tester was on the floor. The coffee maker smelled faintly of vinegar. And somewhere in the garage, the utility cabinet handle remained loose.

Three hours had passed. Nothing had been repaired. The only completed task was coffee. Which had been the original objective, mind you. So technically - flawless execution!

I took a sip. Cold. I stared at the microwave. Thirty buttons stared back. One of them probably reheats beverages perfectly. I don't know exactly which one. So I put the mug inside.

TIME.

3.

0.

START.

Thirty seconds later, the coffee was hot. And as I stood there quietly reconsidering civilization, I noticed something on the microwave control panel I'd never seen before. A button near the bottom. Small. Innocent. It said:

OPTIONS.

I looked at it. It looked at me. Some moments in life demand that curiosity yield to experience. I picked up my coffee and slowly walked away. And left that damned thing until 2:17 on Wednesday....