It is a holiday.  Time for a small side story.

Every morning when I get up… and I am almost always the first one up in the morning, having become my grandfather, who used to wake up at sunrise when I was a kid… part of my morning routine is to setup the coffee machine to make a cup of coffee.

The coffee is not for me, it is for my wife.

I do not drink coffee, which is an odd thing, at least where I live.  It isn’t quite like being, say, a vegan in terms of seeing the world.  Plus I don’t feel the need to tell everybody I don’t drink coffee.  But not drinking coffee does make you wonder at just how ubiquitous it is and how entitled some people can be about having coffee.

I have worked at a number of Silicon Valley tech companies that charged us $2.00 for a soda, but I have never work anywhere in the valley where coffee was anything but free.  Free coffee is practically gospel in tech.

I have also had my share of clashes with co-workers, one of whom yelled at me for being the first one in the office in the morning and not making coffee for everyone.  This was, of course, at a company that was charging me $2.00 for a soda, so my sympathy for the subsidized coffee crowd was pretty low.

But, as I believe I rightly pointed out, since I don’t drink the coffee I have no skin in the game when it comes to quality.  I am not the person you want doing that… and I only had to make decaf for everybody once for people to leave me alone.

I am not completely ignorant.  I did that on purpose.  You can hardly not learn about coffee being around coffee drinkers.  But is was a “leave me alone and make your own damn coffee” message I had to send.

Anyway, as such it never occurred to me to make coffee for my wife because, if the situation were reversed, I wouldn’t want her to make it for me… because, again, no commitment to the outcome.

But a while back my wife asked if I wouldn’t just do this for her.  It isn’t a difficult process.  We have a coffee maker with a single cup option.  You just rinse out the basket, pour in some grounds, put water in the machine, and place the cup where the coffee comes out.  Then when she gets up, she presses the button and coffee comes out and she adds whatever it is she puts into it on her own.

She isn’t daring enough to give me that task.

The odd things is when I started setting up her coffee she said it was better somehow.  I took this to mean that it was nice that I was doing it for her, which she agreed with.  But she also insisted that it was somehow hotter or different than when she makes it herself, to the point that she wanted to watch me put it together one morning.

Which required me to demonstrate how mildly obsessive I can be about things that matter, and her coffee now mattered to me.  And once I was doing this I knew I couldn’t measure the output, so I paid close attention to the consistency of the inputs.

So after emptying the basket of old grounds, I am thorough in cleaning it.  No stale residue is allowed to linger there or on the holder.

I have a mark on the basket so that I fill it with the same amount of fresh grounds every day.  Then I make sure to flatten the grounds such that, rather than a cone of grounds sticking up there is something of a valley in the grounds to make sure the water flows through them rather than rolling down the side and out of the basket.

I have a measuring cup in the coffee cupboard along with all the cups so I pour in the exact same amount every day.  This was a contentious for a bit because my wife has a variety of coffee cups, some larger than others, so she would complain that I didn’t add enough water to some of the larger cups.

So I went out and bought her a couple more of her favorite coffee cup, a Ralph Lauren design with an animal print stripe around the top.

I had to go find them on eBay because the cup was from a collection a decade or more back.

And in doing so I have tried to control all the inputs to keep them consistent so as to produce as reliable of an output as I can manage.

Because, of course, I never sample the output.  I don’t drink coffee.

I will not, however, go order her a drink at Starbucks unless she texts me exactly what she wants to I can show it to the person behind the counter and say, “Whatever this is.”