Ah! Great Mysteries of Life

I need caffeine like I need blood so I regularly face THE COFFEE MAKER in my kitchen. It doesn’t look intimidating. It just looks like your run-of-the-mill coffee maker from Target. But it’s not. That’s just what it wants you to think…

Along with one of Life’s Great Mysteries (cue the Twilight Zone theme), the mystery of where the second socks of a pair go in the dryer, is the mystery of where the coffee goes in my coffee maker. Since an episode of The Twilight Zone solved the sock thing, I am personally focusing on the coffee maker. It’s making me completely bonkers, and if this keeps up I will have to be carted away in a smart white jacket that ties in the back.

I went to school. I paid attention in Science classes, and I have a passing knowledge of every-day physics, but this is too much. My coffee maker defies the laws of physics. Daily. It has “smart” in the name of the appliance, but there must be a meaning for the word “smart” I am unaware of, because smart, this thing isn’t. It is not brainy. It is not smart in the sense that it is fashionable and trendy. It is no version of smart I can figure out, save one: it defies the laws of physics.

Here’s my morning scenario. All right, you caught me. I am a writer, so my morning scenario takes place at all hours of the day or night, whenever the muse strikes me, but the mechanics are the same: must have caffeine, and must have it now! I go to the kitchen, you know, that room where you store boxes from takeout in the trash until trash day comes around again, and face…THE COFFEE MAKER.

The coffee maker has a capacity of 12 cups. So I fill the glass carafe with 12 cups of water and pour it into the water reservoir of the coffee maker. I put 12 cups worth of freshly ground Caribou French Roast or Starbucks Breakfast Blend coffee beans into the paper filter. Press the button and a few minutes later I have 12 cups of coffee, right? WRONG!

If I’m lucky, I get less than 12 cups. Now I know that sounds rather silly to think it is lucky to be cheated by a cup or two, but for someone with a carpeted kitchen (we receive takeout there, it’s not a room for, um, cooking or anything), then getting less is the better option, because if you don’t get less, you get MORE.

For several days running, I get 10 cups back for the 12 cups of water I put in. The water reservoir is empty, so the water went somewhere. The pot has 10 cups of coffee. Where did the other 2 cups go? Ah, but that’s not even the mystery part. There’s a lot of steam, so the extra two cups may have gone up in smoke, so to speak. It is weird. It shouldn’t happen that 1/6 of my total coffee just steams away into the atmosphere, but there you have it. It happens, and I live with it. And since I am not a physicist, I just accept it. Stuff happens. Anyone who has ever worn a t-shirt knows that.

All right. We have established that while maybe not totally normal, there is a semi-logical explanation for “where did the coffee go?” It’s steam. Somewhere over Asia, it’s raining my coffee. I can buy that. It’s a general rule of physics that things take the path of least resistance. My path of least resistance is just to believe the coffee is in the atmosphere, and the acid rain over Asia is just Starbucks Breakfast Blend. I could call the Ghost Hunters from T.A.P.S., but they’re in Rhode Island and I’m not sure they’d come this far just to explain where my coffee goes.

Enter the mysterious part. I have been losing coffee to the atmosphere for several days, but I keep plodding along, diligently making more coffee whenever the caffeine bug strikes, when, probably because of the hours I keep and the fact that the word “sleep” has no real meaning for me, is frequently. I go to the kitchen and face “The Machine”. I give it 12 cups of water and the equivalent amount of freshly-ground coffee beans and it gives me 15 cups of coffee! WHAT?

It might not be exactly 15 cups of coffee; it might be more or less. It is hard to measure what you get back by walking on a towel to soak it up out of the kitchen carpet. It has gone over the top of the 12 cup carafe, and run down the counter onto the floor. And it’s not a wee bit, either. It’s a lot. The coffee maker needs water to make coffee. I know this, without a physics degree. But what I don’t understand is WHERE has this water been for the last three days, and why does it all come back at once?

If you can explain this to me, you will have my undying gratitude. I guess since I cannot personally defy the laws of physics, maybe the thing IS smart. One thing I know for certain: it is smarter than I am. Maybe I should stick with tea, where you make it one cup at a time and it never floods your kitchen.