Sometimes you go into a situation with the mindful intention of not making things worse. However, after the dust settles (or the mushroom cloud dissipates), you realize that you actually could not have screwed things up any worse if you had actually tried. ... Queue the story about the filter incident ... As I was letting dinner cook on the stove one evening, I figured that I would multi-task and prepare the coffee pot for the next morning. This is a ritual that I undertake every evening, and one that I have come to step through in a somewhat mindless manner. Certainly a task that a dullard could very easily handle without trouble or notice. I, as usual, opened the top of the machine and grabbed the basket that held that morning's old coffee grounds. I then only had to carry the basket a distance of about 3 feet, over level flooring, from the machine to the sink. However, somewhere along the way, the filter slipped from my finger tips. If it had simply fallen straight to the floor, it would not have been a blog-worthy anecdote. However, in my haste to try to quickly grab the falling filter basket, it bounced off my fingers and started to spin and rotate sending wet coffee grounds a-flyin'. The more I tried to grab the basket, the more I continued to volley-ball it around the kitchen. What had started off as a nice, neat, and tidy kitchen area, was now covered floor to ceiling with the grounds. It looked like I had thrown a bucket of fresh beetle carcasses into a high-speed, oscillating floor fan. It was so bad, I just couldn't get mad. It actually was kind of funny in a oh-crap-now-I've-got-to-clean-this-mess-up sort of way. Witnessing the carnage, I got to work cleaning and scrubbing and trying to restore order. After 20 minutes, I was reasonably satisfied with my efforts. Oh crap! I forgot about my dinner on the stove. It was now burned beyond recognition. As I sat there gnawing on the now unrecognizable, charcoal-esque meat substance, I realized that this situation played out a lot like some pretty disappointing episodes in my life. The take-home lesson is just to let the filter hit the floor and then deal with the smallest size problem possible. Either that or just don't drink coffee.
Tuesday, June 8, 2010
The Filter Incident
Sometimes you go into a situation with the mindful intention of not making things worse. However, after the dust settles (or the mushroom cloud dissipates), you realize that you actually could not have screwed things up any worse if you had actually tried. ... Queue the story about the filter incident ... As I was letting dinner cook on the stove one evening, I figured that I would multi-task and prepare the coffee pot for the next morning. This is a ritual that I undertake every evening, and one that I have come to step through in a somewhat mindless manner. Certainly a task that a dullard could very easily handle without trouble or notice. I, as usual, opened the top of the machine and grabbed the basket that held that morning's old coffee grounds. I then only had to carry the basket a distance of about 3 feet, over level flooring, from the machine to the sink. However, somewhere along the way, the filter slipped from my finger tips. If it had simply fallen straight to the floor, it would not have been a blog-worthy anecdote. However, in my haste to try to quickly grab the falling filter basket, it bounced off my fingers and started to spin and rotate sending wet coffee grounds a-flyin'. The more I tried to grab the basket, the more I continued to volley-ball it around the kitchen. What had started off as a nice, neat, and tidy kitchen area, was now covered floor to ceiling with the grounds. It looked like I had thrown a bucket of fresh beetle carcasses into a high-speed, oscillating floor fan. It was so bad, I just couldn't get mad. It actually was kind of funny in a oh-crap-now-I've-got-to-clean-this-mess-up sort of way. Witnessing the carnage, I got to work cleaning and scrubbing and trying to restore order. After 20 minutes, I was reasonably satisfied with my efforts. Oh crap! I forgot about my dinner on the stove. It was now burned beyond recognition. As I sat there gnawing on the now unrecognizable, charcoal-esque meat substance, I realized that this situation played out a lot like some pretty disappointing episodes in my life. The take-home lesson is just to let the filter hit the floor and then deal with the smallest size problem possible. Either that or just don't drink coffee.
