Almost 40 years ago, I made and drank my first cup of coffee and I’ll admit that I was not really impressed with that brown nectar that some people in the world refer to as Arabian wine. I was young, working in an office that rotated the female employees through a schedule of taking care of the break room with the male employees exempt.  When your week fell on the calendar you were responsible for keeping the room clean and making the coffee each morning. Sheer terror enveloped me when I learned that this task would be a requirement of my employment in said office.  The only experience I had with coffee was watching Mom make a cup of instant coffee when she had a hangover from the night before.

The break room had an area like a little mini kitchen with a sink, refrigerator, and a huge coffee percolating  urn that made around 50 cups of coffee.  A couple of cabinets on the wall and under the sink held supplies, dish washing soap, towels and everyone’s personal coffee cups.  On the wall next to the monster looking urn was the calendar showing who was scheduled that month for break room duty.

The first time I saw my name written on the calendar, I panicked! I didn’t know how to operate a contraption like that and besides I didn’t even drink coffee! So, I marched my young little naive self out to the Wicked Witch’s desk (otherwise known as our Office Manager…seriously she could have been a sister to the one who taunted poor Dorothy) and explained that there was a mistake because I was not a coffee drinker and therefore should not have to make coffee.  “It matters not to me whether you drink coffee or not. You will be a part of the rotation so I would suggest that you learn to make coffee before your week arrives. Besides young lady, how do you ever expect to get a man if you can’t make coffee?” the Office Manager says with such conviction and venom in her voice.

Well, I did need that job so somehow I would learn to make coffee. As for getting a man because I knew how to make coffee…I was pretty sure the lady was stuck back in the Victorian Age or possibly had seen too many Mrs. Olsen commercials!

I asked the gal who had break room duty that week to teach me how to work that contraption and to make coffee. I found I liked the aroma that wafted through the room as the coffee began to percolate and I enjoyed playing with the amount of coffee that I put in for each urn full. After a couple of times of being on duty, I started to get compliments on how good the coffee was so I decided maybe I should try some. My first cup was black and I didn’t like it at all. Again, I began to experiment by adding cream and sugar until I thought it was sort of tasty. You should know that in order for me to think it was tasty, I had a little bit of coffee laced into my cream and sugar. What can I say, it was very cheap coffee but I didn’t know that then. To me coffee was coffee, right?

Fast forward 40 years, coffee is now my beverage of choice and because I no longer use the cheap stuff there is less need for heaps of sugar and cream.  Maybe Mrs. Olsen and that wicked witch of an office manager weren’t so off the mark after all, a gal might not catch a man because she can make coffee but he might want to stay around longer if among other things he gets a great cup of coffee in the morning…and that’s my trip down Coffee Lane.

© 2010, Bev Owens. All rights reserved.

When the shoulders of the other kids fell in disappointment over the report assignment, I was grinning from ear to ear and couldn't wait to get started. I've always loved doing research on topics and then writing about what I've found. My newest endeavors are blogging and writing fiction.

Bev Owens

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Tags: break room, coffee, memoir, percolator, urn

This entry was posted on July 21, 2010 at 6:15 am and is filed under Authors Corner, Bev, Memoirs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.