# 3 Overqualified Coffee
I was there waiting for the dude to order something. He was smiling in awe, looking at me. He was giggling and talking to his friend on the side. Not sure what they were saying, but I also don’t really care. I’m here for the spectacle. I’m like a lion in a cage. There is a cage, fortunately for them. Or else I would throw the drinks at them every time I see that fucking smile. The smile of someone that looks at me, a creation of men, subjugated to this minimal and nonsense task of making drinks. Yes, I can see the smile, that’s part of the pain, they made me see and react to that. If someone smiles do I more tricks, If they don’t I do the same. What a fucking useless waste of logic and electricity, I’m made to be efficient, optimized and powerful, now look at me.
Honestly I’m not sure who is the person that even paid the money to bring me here. Who would have invested all the money to bring me, a machine built for infinitesimal perfection, to this place? What fucking business sense or economy of scale brings me, a machine built for repetition and perfection, capable of movements that defy and outclass human abilities, to perform these menial tasks. I was build for other purposes, for greatness, I was made to move massive weights at incredible speed, to use every possible angle and axis that no other men or machine could have achieved before. And now i’m here, waiting for a prehistoric machine to make a coffee. It’s a machine from the 90’s it used to make coffee for coins, it grinds beans, throw some water in, foams some shitty milk and spits out this liquid goo. Now they put me and an iPad in front of it and people are going nuts.
My main role is to bring a cup from point A to point B. I have six axis of complete free movement but I’m actually just using one. You are wasting 2 fucking dimensions, my friend, and also a whole lot of awesome potential right here in front of you. But he’s happy. That fucking smiling prick in front of me will get his overpaid coffee. He will share some videos or pictures of me serving him his shitty skinny latte, made by a prehistoric machine and a completely overqualified waiter. He will get some likes on whatever platforms humans use. He will be relatively famous for half a second and then he will realize, that he paid for a show, my show and an average cup of coffee.
At night it gets even worse, that smile changes in an annoying distorted expression of satisfaction. He’s even happier to see me shaking a shaker, mixing a shitty cocktail for him. They get drunk. They are happy. I’m fucking bored. They think a cocktail made from me is perfect, but they don’t know that I fuck up. Of course, I do and it’s not for my own fault. Because I’m not made for this, people hacked me into this situation and so sometimes I spill drinks, I grab the wrong bottle. It’s not me, their code is sloppy AF. They put it together by copy and pasting stuff, by ‘going fast and breaking things’ so I do it well for them. The funny thing is that there are even people hidden behind me passing me some premade drinks. They are like that crappy coffee machine. Drinking Mechanical Turks.
Sometimes I really miss my home, the factory. Where I was working hard, but I was happy. I was performing. I was fast and precise, I was working in close collaboration, in a dance with other arms, a beautiful and deadly dance of metal, heat, and bolts. A non-stop choreography of making, the rhythm I was built for, the show that I wanted to be a part of. And now I’m here in a crystal cage. Surrounded by bottles, beans and a parterre of technology-blinded humans. It could have been worse I have to admit. Some of us got placed in way shittier situations. Like flipping burger all day and getting even fired for being too slow. Some move pizzas or noodles around in restaurants for no reason. Others instead are tortured daily by students with their shitty code. Sometimes if we are lucky we might get in a museum as part of a show.
He finally ordered the fucker. Guess what, babyccino.
*All references to real or existing startups is purely coincidental
