Coffee Clutch

I've taken advantage of the three-day weekend to draw up a new comic strip. Actually, I drew this strip a while ago but have been too lazy to scan and post it. Mea culpa.

One of the more glaring differences between life as a gubment employee and life as a corporate shill is the morning coffee routine. At The Firm, coffee was provided to employees free of charge every morning by cheerful maintenance people. There were like five different kinds of coffee. For most of my first year at The Firm, people complained about the coffee because the coffee tasted bad. This may have been because the coffee was of poor quality, but some cursory investigation revealed that the cheerful maintenance people hadn't cleaned the coffee makers in a number of years.

The Associates Committee revolted, demanding better coffee from the management (I'm not making this up). At last, the management relented, and The Firm was visited by a representative from some sort of company that sells coffee to big corporate concerns like The Firm. The man held a coffee tasting, where we were invited to sample the offerings of Peet's, Starbucks, and Flavia. The guy pushed Peet's and Flavia hard. Flavia, in case you haven't had the pleasure, is a company that sells needlessly fancy machines that make fake, nasty-tasting espresso drinks from syrups and powders. It takes a lot of money to pay for the LCD display, the fun noises, and the fancy mylar packaging, so the quality of the end product suffers. During the tasting, I had a Milky Way Espresso Swirl. Imagine espresso from a mix, chocolate from a mix, vanilla from a mix, and caramel from a mix, all mixed together with hot water. That's what the drink tasted like. It also tasted like popcorn for reasons I haven't been able to figure out.

In the end, The Firm chose Peet's and Flavia, succumbing to the rep's hard sell. People were happy with the new coffee. They will likely remain happy for about two years until the coffee makers once again become unbearably crudded up. These are the kinds of tribulations America's lawyers must deal with.

Now, of course, my co-workers and I are forced to fend for ourselves in the coffee department. We buy our own coffee and filters and make it our damn selves. But at least we clean the pot.