Post #6: The Travels of Mr. Coffee™

This is an incomplete portion of the presumably long, strange story of a Mr. Coffee coffee machine that crossed my path a while back.

During the fall of 2020, I was “attending” college remotely, living 3,000 miles away from my campus. As a student who had never actually seen the college I supposedly went to, I found it very difficult to even consider myself a college student. Because my first semester of higher education was, for obvious reasons, profoundly different from what I had expected it would be like, I struggled to convince myself that I was, in fact, a student in college. In a way, the fall semester felt like a fever dream extension of my abbreviated high school experience. However, there was one new development in my life that grounded me in my new reality: caffeine.

To deal with the workload of college, the time-suck of part time work, and the procrastination skills that followed me from High school, I suddenly developed a habit of high caffeine consumption. What started as 1 cup a day quickly became 4. While this was debatably an unhealthy practice, it got me through the fall semester conscious and with passing grades.

A few weeks after the end of the semester, I got a Mr. Coffee machine for Christmas. A practical but appreciated gift. When I asked my mom where she got it, she said, “you know, it’s actually kind of a weird story”.

She had been at a store, doing some personal/holiday shopping. She recalled that she wanted to get me a coffee machine, but there were none left on the shelves at the store. Later, she passed a garage sale on her drive home, and for whatever reason, decided to stop. She got out, and lo and behold, a perfectly adequate coffee machine. She approached the woman running the show and asked her about the item in question. The woman responded with a reasonable price for the item, 10 dollars, and a less reasonable origin story of the item. She claimed that a few months ago, an unexpected package with her correct name and address, but no name of sender or return address, appeared on her doorstep. Upon opening it, she found a brand new Mr. Coffee Coffeemaker™. She had no use for it, and so it eventually made it’s way to her yard sale.

Fast forward several months, and I’m still a student attending college remotely, but this time from an apple farm only 1,000 miles away from campus. Considerable geographic progress. Although my location changed, the caffeine fixation remained constant. The process for making coffee on the farm was more time consuming and produced lower quality coffee, so my mom offered to send me my coffee machine that I had left at home. I agreed, she shipped it out here, and I blew a fuse on the first use. It turns out you can’t use a 900 watt appliance running off solar power when there’s not much sun out. Now I was saddled with an obsolete machine and (as stated in some of my previous writings) a complete lack of working knowledge regarding the postal system. The Mr. Coffee sat in a drawer for several months before he was called into action again.

While talking with the owner of a local airbnb, he complained to me about how his last guests managed to break his machine. This person had been very kind and helpful to me during my time on the farm, and I decided to pay back that good will in the form of a lonely Mr. Coffee Coffeemaker™ that had recently fallen into disuse. I gave him the machine and heard nothing of it until several weeks later when the topic came up. I was told by the airbnb owner that his guests either stole or somehow misplaced the machine. He charged them for the item, but they claimed that they genuinely had no idea where it had gone.

Sometimes I wonder about the true origin and final destination of this elusive machine. The same questions that have often been asked of Cotton Eyed Joe come to mind: where did you come from and where did you go? Ultimately, these are questions that I can’t answer, and will probably never be able to. I have to come to terms with this fact, accept it, and learn to live with it. Mr. Coffee, wherever you are, I hope you continue in your pursuit to confound the human mind.

There are probably many subjects more urgent or fascinating to write about than the partial journey of a mysterious Mr. Coffee Coffeemaker, but, for better of worse, this is what was written.