by Vincent Scuro
Thirteen thousand, five hundred.
That’s the approximate number of cups of coffee that I have consumed over the past 37 years, roughly from the time I started working full time to present day.
I remember the first cup of coffee I had at work as if it were yesterday.
Certain moments in life, no matter how seemingly trivial, tend to stand out, and this was one of them.
It all started when a co-worker stopped by my office at about 9:30 one morning.
“I’m going out for another cup of coffee. Do you want me to get you one?”
It’s worth mentioning that the place where I worked didn’t have a coffee service, and they didn’t allow you to brew your own. If you wanted coffee, you had to bring it from home in a thermos or buy it at one of the nearby stores. Back then, there were no gourmet shops, and a cup of freshly brewed coffee cost about a quarter. I’m not going to try to calculate that in today’s dollars, but I remember that it didn’t feel like I was spending a lot of money.
“No, but can you get me a hot tea, plain, no sugar?” I asked.
Several moments later, she returned to my office with a cardboard cup in each hand, both covered with plastic lids. After we removed the lids, we discovered that neither contained tea, albeit one had cream and sugar, and the other was black with no sugar. Rather than make her go all the way back to the store, I did the noble thing and drank the black coffee.
I liked it.
As they say, the rest is history.
From then on, a cup of coffee became the regular routine upon my arrival at work, with an occasional indulgence in another cup a few hours later.
I’ve worked at several places throughout the years, all with different coffee cultures. At one place, a coffee wagon came around twice every morning, thus I had the convenience of not having to go out for my cups of coffee.
At still another, the employer didn’t supply coffee, and the regular employees weren’t allowed to brew their own or bring it in from the outside. However, through some technicality of my employment arrangement — I managed the daily database reports for the facility — I was allowed to have my own coffeepot.
It wasn’t long before I became, through no fault of my own, the most powerful person in the building. Simply put, if you wanted fresh, hot coffee first thing in the morning or a second cup later in the day, you had to see me.
During my entire tenure there, I never had to buy a pound of coffee. As word spread throughout the building that I was “brewing some,” my co-workers brought in pound after pound of ground beans, filters, cups and other supplies, so they could move to the top of my you-can-have-some-fresh-hot-coffee list.
Eventually things reached critical mass. So many people had brought me coffee supplies, my supply cabinet was filled to the brim.
One day, a new guy came by with a pound of coffee. He had heard about my coffeepot and wanted to get on the list.
“I really have enough coffee to last me for the next two years,” I said.
There was a disappointed look on his face. After a few contemplative moments, he grinned.
“How about some doughnuts?”
His idea had merit. I went for the gold.
“Boston cream?” I asked.
He thought about it for two seconds.
“Done.”
The idea of having a doughnut filled with vanilla custard and topped with chocolate icing brought to me every morning made my mouth water. Little did I realize that what seemed like a good idea at the time fell under the law of unintended consequences.
The next morning and every morning after, I walked into an office stacked with a dozen boxes of Boston cream doughnuts, six to a box. Apparently, word had spread throughout the facility that if you wanted to be on the you-can-have-some-fresh-hot-coffee list, you had to bring doughnuts.
Given that 72 Boston cream doughnuts was more than I wanted to consume in a year, let alone every day, I gave them away. That created a different problem. I wasn’t just running a database office anymore. Now I was running a coffee and doughnut shop.
One day, the coffeepot cracked. Maybe it was from all the coffee I was making. Maybe it was a sign from heaven. It didn’t matter. Since no one could have coffee that day, there nearly was a riot.
I had to listen to “What? No coffee? I brought you doughnuts!” all day.
Time passed. I moved on to another job and went on a diet, swearing never to eat another Boston cream doughnut again. My new employer provided coffee to the employees at a price.
“Twenty-five cents a cup,” they told me during my first-day-on-the-job orientation tour. “Or you can join the coffee club and pay $3 per week for unlimited fresh hot coffee.”
Three dollars?
Since I drank only two cups per day, the coffee club math didn’t work for me. Nevertheless, I dropped a quarter in the can and poured myself a cup just to see what it was like.
I took a small sip.
Yuck, I thought. The stuff tasted like dishwater.
Not wanting to make a bad impression on my first day, I didn’t complain openly. However, I did ask how much coffee they put in per pot.
“We use three scoops for every 12 cups of coffee.”
I asked to see the scooper. It was small, like the one I used at home.
As I discovered a few years later, the coffee club was one of the company’s profit centers, even though coffee had nothing to do with its core business.
Not one to make waves at a new job, yet still wanting a good cup of coffee first thing in the morning and another cup a few hours after that, I went out on my lunch break to a local discount store and picked up my own four-cup personal coffeepot.
I still use that same coffeepot in my current office, and occasionally, I share some with my co-workers.
However, today, they don’t have to bring Boston cream doughnuts to get a fresh cup.
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