Coffee junkies will understand...

Hi, my name is Vic and I am a coffee junkie... (Crowd : Hi Vic!)
Yeah, it got worse too, when I discovered that coffee tastes even better when it's fresh, as in, freshly roasted on one's own deck, freshly ground 24hrs after roasting, and that it was cheaper to roast your own than to buy store coffee at $8+/lb.

So...I found a great place to order green beans from (www.sweetmarias.com), where they have a lot of info on roasting coffee at home. I was in bean-heaven, let me tell you! I got a Fresh Roast roaster, and did really well, until one colder than chilly day, I couldn't get the beans as dark as I liked, so I did the cardboard box trick...and toasted my roaster! Scratch one roaster.

Got it repaired. It died. Repaired. It died again. New Fresh Roast. It died. Now, don't go thinking that Fresh Roast makes a bad roaster-- 'cause they don't. I am just hard on roasters I guess, probably because I like my coffee dark, dark enough to dissolve your stirring spoon! So after 5 or so repairs/replacements, I decided to try something else.

I tried cheap store coffee. In a word...YUCK! Even expensive store coffee does not compare. I tried. Really, I did! If it came to the end of the world as we know it, I could manage to drink store coffee, but I would not enjoy it.

Finally I decided to try the air-popper method on green beans. Picked one up cheap on Fleabay, and voila! Fresh Roasted Coffee again! It's a bit more labor intensive to air-pop your beans. There's no timer cut off, so you have to watch it the whole time. It is more sensitive to cold temps outside, where I roast to avoid the smoke getting in the house.

And then yesterday...disaster struck! As I moved the roaster to the counter, the power cord snagged on a kitchen chair, pulling the unit out of my hand! It smashed on the floor, doing serious damage to the casing! It basically shattered. Not again! I thought...So I grabbed the fire extinguisher, loaded the beans into the roaster anyway, and sat outside, waiting to see if it self destructed on the deck (hence the fire extinguisher), or if it would even run.

Well, luck was with me, and it DID run like normal (a bit noisier though), and more importantly, it did not self destruct! So I have coffee today. :)

Jihad Du'Jour

First and foremost, yes it's been awhile. We've been busy and the creative muse isn't visiting.

Secondly,

For the NSA, CIA, FBI, alphabet soup folks rest easy. Although this contains one of your watch words it isn't from Osama. And please understand, I don't know where he is, if I did, I'd be claiming the reward and dropping off what was left of him on your doorstep, that reward money would come in real handy. Also please note, this contains a French word, du'jour. The only thing the cheese eating surrender monkeys might Jihad is how fast they can retreat and give up.

And thirdly, the names have been changed to protect the guilty.

Now on the the gist of my day.

Here lately my day doesn't seem to be complete unless I find some bit of idiocy at work to rant about and launch the Jihad du'jour, (Jihad of the day for those from Rio Linda). Yesterday it was about my laptop computer and wireless access, without which I am dead in the water and can't get my job done. Today it was really stupid ideas from people high up in the food chain.

As most of the four people who actually read our blog know, I work for a rather large corporation. For the sake of staying out of trouble with the corporate attorneys, and in homage of our corporate logo lets just say I work for Deathstar Incorporated.

It seems that us lowly peons who actually have to do REAL WORK are being afflicted with a plague of "really bright ideas" coming from people in senior management. It just so happens that most of these people in senior management went to that special school of "REALLY STUPID IDEAS". I am guessing that school probably cost a whole lot and was somewhere in either the land of fruits and nuts or the left coast. Of course it could also be that most of these senior managers came into Deathstar Incorporated at a management level and have no concept as to how things actually work down at the level where real work gets done.

Less than bright idea #1 is how we, (the working folk) are measured. We get graded based on how many "jobs" get done in a certain time period that just happens to correspond to a normal work day, (I'd call it what it is but I have to hide from the corporate attorneys). Of course some bean counter sitting behind a desk has to have their bean to count to feel productive so I really can't begrudge them that but it's next to impossible to assign a numeric value to my job as there are just way to many variables. One job may take 30 minutes, another job may take several days...

Less than bright idea #2 is when we are supposed to go to the actual job site. Since we have critical commitment dates on when we have to hand our "product" over to the customer someone in senior management came up with the idea of just send the worker bees out earlier. In a perfect world this would be a fine idea. Unfortunately, we don't live in a perfect world. The less than bright idea part was that senior management failed to let everyone in the company know this, so now we find ourselves sitting in front of a customer who is REAL ANXIOUS for us to hand over our "product" only to have to tell them that, we're really sorry, we can't give it to you yet. While we may be here to do our job, other people haven't done their job and won't do their job until we get to that firm commitment date, because it just isn't a priority for them right now and besides, it's breakfast taco day.

And finally, (for this blog anyway, I am sure there are millions more stupid ideas floating around Deathstar Incorporated) is less than bright idea #3. I'll call this idea QFU. QFU was thought up so people who are sitting at a desk with a phone don't actually have to be bothered by answering the bloody freaking phone. QFU is a system that we are supposed to use to send in a design change on our product via the computer. Sounds like a great idea in theory. Unfortunately the real world intrudes and tends to make a hash of theoretical ideas. QFU works like this. I stand out in the hot sun with a customer who really wants our product today and is thrilled that I am there early. Unfortunately, even though the customer ordered product "A" at location "B", the fine, highly intelligent folks in engineering designed him product "Q" for location "Z". I now have to boot up and log into my computer which sometimes can take awhile depending on the mood of my computer and wireless access. Now I have to submit a QFU ticket to these highly trained designers. While submitting this ticket, I have to assign it a priority level so it will be handled in a timely manner. However I must have a different idea of timely manner as their idea of high priority involves a two hour wait. Through this QFU system I tell them that the customer wants product "A" at location "B". Then I am supposed to wait up to two hours for them to come back with a new design which just happens to be for product "P" at location "M". Which in turn I submit another QFU ticket, wait up to two more hours and have a design of product "J" at location "R", and repeat, repeat, repeat, until they finally give you the design you need. Can you imagine how that looks to the customer? Of course the other option is to send in the QFU ticket, leave to go the next job only to have to send in a QFU ticket on that one, leave to go to the next to do the same thing, and in the process get FREAKING NOTHING done for the day, other than make the one bean counter counting QFU tickets happy, the bean counter counting how many jobs I did that day mad, and in the process make the customer wonder why in the heck he ever ordered product "A" for location "B" from Deathstar Incorporated anyway.

Of course come Monday, I am sure there will be a different wall to beat my head against. I guess having a hard head comes in handy for some things.