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OK, I was wrong.

In the post where I talked about the Scooba dying at the virtually the same time as my monitor I was sure that the next appliance to go belly-up would be either the “bearings-bearings-who’s-got-the-bearings” washing machine or the “for-the-love-of-God-what-is-that-noise” microwave oven.  In fact, it was the coffee maker.

I wrote an article when we first got the Tassimo (by Braun) describing our new toy.  Happy visions of gourmet coffees, teas and even hot cocoa danced through our heads.

What was significantly less happy-making was the repeated and spectacular disc failures that would happen with about 80% of any coffees that were not Maxwell House (12 oz version) or Seattle’s Best.  They would explode and make a huge mess in the coffee maker and in my cup near the completion of the brewing cycle.  Watching it near the end of a brewing cycle became exactly as gut-wrenching as watching that little mountain climber guy from the Price is Right approach “25″…

Making coffee should not be ulcer-inducing.  Drinking it, maybe.  Not making it.

For those of you that are interested and have a cabinet filled with exploding coffee disks, I found a “hack” that bumped up the success rate of the faulty discs.  Since the Seattle’s Best never failed, I cut out the bar code from a used one and covered up the bar code from one of the fragile discs.  Works pretty much all the time except you need to remember the orientation of the bar code.  Maybe its not being perfectly brewed, and its kind of a hassle but at least I don’t spend my mornings going all Angry German Kid in my kitchen while cleaning up coffee grounds.

It might be worth your time to complain to Tassimo about faulty discs.  They will send you free new ones, when they get around to it.  Unfortunately, these also have the same failure mode and rate.  Luckily, I really enjoy the Seattle’s Best coffees, so that’s pretty much all I get anyway.  That and the Chai Tea, which has also never failed.

Where was I?  Oh, yeah.  After brewing a cup of coffee last Saturday, I disposed of my disc and sat down at the computer to check the news.  About 5 minutes later a sound like the one the bird makes when Mr. Slate calls “quitting time” at the quarry came blasting out of the kitchen.  I ran in and steam was burping out of every crevice on the machine.

I yanked the plug and let the thing cool down for a while.  I plugged it back in and the little lights on the front started to blink in a very sickly, unsteady way as if to say “the error codes in my EEPROM simply don’t cover this, man.  You are on your own.”.  I am sure all of the electronics are ruined.

I checked out their forums and found no failures like mine.  Lots of complaints about customer service and exploding discs, though.  I called customer service (open 24/7, according to their website) and told them what happened.

The lady on the other end of the phone (who apparently just finished a “I bet I can drink more Red Bulls than you” contest with her co-workers)  laughed and said “Well, that shouldn’t happen!”. I agreed with her and said I was thankful that I was not standing next to it at the time or had left the house already.  She stopped laughing after that.

She said that they are sending out a box with which to ship the coffee maker back, but “it is coming from Canada so it might take a while to get there”.  I reminded her that it is 2008, and it shouldn’t matter if it was coming from the moon she should be able to tell me better than “it’s going to be a while”.  And I don’t know many Canadians, but from what I hear they pretty much have their act together… So I don’t know what she was talking about.

It has been 5 days and still no box.  I did get an e-mail tonight, though, that said “my order has been shipped”.  I assume they mean the box.   I will post when it gets here.

In the meantime I will continue to enjoy the crystalline goodness that is Folger’s Instant Coffee.  Heated up in my awesome microwave…

(For those of you that want to “get their geek on”, read the title of this post in as crone-ish of a tone as you can.  There you go.  )

Ok, it’s been a couple of weeks since I have posted anything.  Sorry about that.  I stick by my usual excuse: I’ve been busy.  Over the last couple of weeks I have been beta testing software for Agmorion, editing video for a side-project (I will let y’all know about that one later), re-purposing a couple pieces of furniture (pictures forthcoming), and repair work around the house.

The Prize Pool and Charity Pool have been appropriately updated.  A new hint will be posted in the next couple of weeks.  Good Luck!  I am also reconsidering the format of the Prize and Charity pools… basically because I am broke.  This might be the last puzzle that has cash tied to it…  Who knows?

My next post will be about the recovery of Scooba (yeah!) and the demise of the Tassimo (it basically overheated spectacularly on the countertop) and my progress in getting it replaced (it has been 5 days since they said they were going to ship out a box to mail it back in).

Hunter’s Stock Picks will be off line for a while.  For those of you that have not been keeping track, trading was stopped once he dipped below 20% down.  It should be up again soon.

 I am considering a number of changes to the site (getting rid of the Haiku section, etc.).  I will be asking for your opinions as I go.

See you tomorrow!

The Prize Pool is up to $30.25.  There are two hints posted.  You can see the current puzzle in the sidebar on the right.  Good Luck!

Hunter’s Stock Picks have been suspended!  Why?  He has reached (once again) the negative 20% mark… I will leave the portfolio up there just to see how it does between now and the next time it is re-started.

Ok.  Sorry about the excessive rantiness of the last post.  I have calmed down a bit now… So to pick up where I went veering off course…

My wife and I went out of town to get some lunch last weekend.  It really doesn’t matter what the name of the place is or what city it was in, because I am sure the little tableau I am about to describe to you is played out every day in every restaurant in America.

Our waiter - polite, smiley, professional - had other tables to deal with besides ours, of course.  We were privileged to sit near two of the fussiest self-important Baby Boomers in the world.  The show started immediately. They wanted ice water, but the standard glasses were the wrong size and needed to be swapped out.  The pause that took place after that request and before he cheerfully replied “Sure thing!” was only a tenth of a second too long, but it was there.  Crammed into that tiny extra interval of silence were huge, shoulder-slumping volumes of dread and sadness that whimpered “Oh no.  Not again.”

You see, waiters and waitresses deal with people all the time and they rapidly become experts at telling exactly where you lie, even before you are seated, on the one-to-ten scale of being a jerk.  And you are a jerk, you know.  That’s why the scale does not go to zero.  You can’t help it, and you probably don’t even know it.  Have you ever asked your server to fetch blue cheese… Then ranch… Then another Coke… Then some A-1, all separately and within a span of three minutes?  Yeah, we all have.  Now multiply that by the number of people who do that over the course of a day, and it starts to get ugly.  Now start to add the unreasonable requests and complaints from people who think of a server as a temporary slave… Yeah…  Either the guy who waited on those harridans had the Zen Master-like control that would put your typical Buckingham Palace guard to shame, or he was one dirty fork complaint away from second degree manslaughter.

I like to think the former.  Please let it be the former….

Back to the snobby jerks at the next table.  How do I know they were snobby?  Did I mention that they were loud?  Oh, yeah, they were loud.  Mostly, their conversation consisted of one-upping each other regarding meaningless historical trivia about their semi-successful distant relatives (e.g. My great uncle was one of the first line foremen when Ford made Model Ts and he had 25 men under him).  I won’t reproduce the entire conversation here but to get the same effect all you would have to do is stand up in the middle of the restaurant and bellow things like “PAY ATTENTION TO ME! PAY ATTENTION TO ME! VALIDATE ME! I’M INTERESTING AND IMPORTANT!” for about five minutes solid.  Also, you would have to do a little dance.

They complained about everything, of course, but the most awesome request one of them had was to put the cappuccino she ordered in a different kind of cup and put the foam in a separate one. In-freaking-credible.  Throughout this whole process of verbal abuse and unbelievable requests the waiter’s façade of happy subservience only cracked once.  As he was walking away from their table his shoulders stiffened ever so slightly.  I could not see his face from where I was sitting, but my wife said he did not look happy… Not happy at all.  Poor guy.

There might be those of you out there that think “Boo hoo, it’s their job.  It’s what they get paid for”.   Ok, fine.  But isn’t it everyone’s job to be civil to each other?  We teach our children to play nice with others and then immediately turn around and try to get some guy fired over a dirty napkin.

Still not convinced to be nice?  Let’s put it this way for the thickheaded: Would you ever walk into a barbershop and yell “Hey, [expletive deleted]! Yeah, I’m talkin’ to you!  Cut my hair, you fat idiot!” Why not?  Ok, now that you have agreed that doing that is probably a bad idea, think about your waiter or waitress… alone in some back room… with your now-only-mostly-tea.

Yeah…  Now maybe you’ll be a little kinder to strangers.

This past weekend my wife and I headed out of town to get some lunch.  You know, that sounds odd even as I write it.  Why would we have to go out of town to get something to eat, you may wonder.  Well, it appears our town has the highest bad restaurant to good restaurant ratio in America.

These places think their definition of “down home Southern cookin’” is somehow a good and just thing to threaten innocent people with.  With vegetables boiled yellow and shapeless and an extra heapin’ helpin’ of bland in everything else, going out to dinner around here is sort of like eating a giant plate of Gerber’s baby food.

What makes it worse is that this is such the polar opposite of what you see on TV that your expectations are unreasonably high from the get-go.  You see happy families enjoying mounds of fried chicken, ribs, and other delicious looking (and possibly actually delicious) food.  Therein lies your folly.  You have hoodwinked yourself into thinking that this is how all (or even most) Southern food must be.  Picture an alien landing on Earth on Christmas morning and happily reporting back what he saw.  Yep, your viewpoint is that distorted.  Most of the restaurant food here is like being trapped in England in about the year 1100 - before trade routes brought much needed flavor to the island from the East.

I am not necessarily saying I would prefer to be waterboarded rather than to eat a plate of our local food, but I really can’t think of a way to end this sentence truthfully.  I honestly think that even Oliver Twist would have said “Please, Sir, may I sit quietly in the corner and starve to death instead?” if the orphanage was run by one of these local restaurant owners.

Surely, there must be a few places locally to go to enjoy a nice sandwich or whatever.  Yeah, with about 50 to choose from you’d think so.  Never mind “statistical clustering”, this town has reached some sort of Blandness Event Horizon where all flavor and appetizing presentation is sucked from the menu shot into oblivion and lost forever.  I mean, even the pizza places are terrible and I am super not picky about pizza.

You may wonder If the food is actually so bad then how do the restaurants stay in business?  Well, my theory is that the town is caught in an Insipidness Feedback Loop (IFL). Here’s how it works: At some point in the town’s past someone (we will call him Zeke) opened the first restaurant and it was “okay, I guess”.  Not great, but at least you could get out of the house and have a drink and some hot food once in a while. Since it was the only game in town, it became popular.  One of the patrons may have said to him or herself with a burst of undeserved overconfidence “This food is okay, I guess, but this town needs another restaurant and people tell me I make a fair Thanksgiving turkey.  Heck, If Zeke can start his own place, then so can I”.

And so the downhill slide began.

A few more places popped up and bored self-important civic league members began Johnny Appleseed out entirely too many “Best in Town” awards.  With the bar set so low to begin with, it was easy for any of these food joints to accumulate any number of these prestigious and meaningless frameables.  Getting a prize was a crystallizing event for these places.  After all, an award says “Good Job!  Keep up the good work.  Don’t change a thing.”

So they stay the course and proudly display their “Voted Best Apple Pie or Whatever in Town” certificate.  This causes people to say “Wow, I didn’t know Emma’s won an award… I always thought the food was kinda crummy.  But what do I know? Let’s go to Emma’s”.  After a while of this (say a couple of decades) this sub-par blandness and how it is prepared actually becomes a “local style”.  While no one genuinely enjoys it, it seems to be what everyone else likes (just look at the awards, after all).  After a little while longer people have become so accustomed to “blah” food that they would probably burn you for witchcraft if you added oregano or (God help you) a bay leaf to your spaghetti sauce.  It may even be fatal to some of the older members of the community - too much of a system shock…

Wow, this got ranty quick.  Sorry about that.  I originally intended to write about the awesome Buckingham Palace Guard-like wait staff at this restaurant we went to over the weekend.  Maybe later this week.     

New RustyRedRock poll!  It’s in the sidebar on the right.

Consider it practice for November…