Coffee machine

Standardisation as a concept is highly underestimated in day-to-day life.

Once upon a time, a ‘coffee machine’ was just that: a machine that produced coffee or at least a fluid with a vague similarity to coffee. The early machines I encountered in various office environments resembled closely the ones at home. The best one was in university: it consumed a full kilogram of coffee beans, needed some mechanical action to grind the beans and then consumed a flood of water. The end product came in quantities to support the entire community to drink something that made them think about coffee; at least they complained about coffee, which can be seen as a success in my book.

But life goes on and a lack of change is a lack of progress. The next generation of coffee machines falls in one of two distinct categories: it either has coffee cups inside or it doesn’t. The cups-included machine has the advantage that the Facilities Department (we are talking coffee machine in the corporation league here) can completely prepare the whole coffee experience. The number of cups is usually not the limiting factor so for all practical purposes these machines can be considered to have an endless cup supply.

The cups-excluded machine can be much smaller since an endless supply of cups is quite bulky. The plastic cups are now stacked around it, so this does not change the spatial impact of the whole thing, but it gives some more flexibility: you can now use your own mug. Apart from the lifestyle component, it is this kind of behaviour that eventually will save our planet.
The worst thing that can happen to you is changing jobs from a cups-included to a cups-excluded type of organisation. Not having to place a coffee cup after making your choice of coffee (cream or sugar or from a whole [XXXX]-load of specialty choices) is something that is handled on a very low conscious level in your limbic system and almost impossible to get right again in the new situation. I personally think it can be argued that learning to ride a bicycle with your arms crossed is easier than making this kind of shift. Having to actually think on a conscious level about cups when standing in front of a coffee machine is beyond me. Please confirm that I am not alone in this…

My point is that intelligent coffee machine designers from all over the world could (and should!) have foreseen this problem. And since in the end we will all evolve to be cupless-coffee-machine-users (due to lifestyle and planet) early standardisation would have been highly preferable. Wasting an entire generation, not to mention rivers of coffee running by when no cup is placed, seems to be close to criminal neglect. The fact that all civil servants in the European Union were not able to prevent this, poses serious questions on their competence in general and their ability to contribute to standardisation in particular.

ERegoS