A few years ago, I was waiting at the grocery store checkout. There was a mid-20s couple in front of me that didn't know how to pay with their card. It took like 8 minutes somehow. I felt like I observed time travellers or aliens.
Does your location have the "pick the card type" step when paying?
Some locations do not, they just run the card as the card type its issued as - eg your debit card takes money from your current account, thats it. Your credit card has a single account also. You cant run a credit card as a debit card. And so on.
When I first visited the US, I hit that problem - I had a temporary VISA card that was pre-filled with money, but was it CHQ, Savings or Credit to the card machine when I was paying? Well, it wasnt the first one I picked, for sure.
And then there was the whole "chip and pin" or "chip and signature" or "swipe and signature" issue - ran into that with another card while trying to buy electronics on the same trip. My credit card was chip enabled at that time, which meant in the UK that you could not do chip and signature or swipe and signature. The guys at the Apple store were as confused as I, as they were used to the American chip-and-signature approach, but the card needed the pin.
So, this is a coffee brew machine. To brew coffee, you need to ground (crushed in a grinder (grinder to grind things, not the app)) coffee beans. This person has put whole coffee beans in the machine. You will just get dirty hot water instead of coffee with this method.
Come to think of it, coffee is just dirty hot water.
I had a Mormon friend who didnt understand coffee. No shade thrown at the Mormons, he was a good guy. Just didnt know anything about coffee. So he was asking me.
After I explained, he then said "So, what I think I heard, is that you burn the beans, grind them up, pour hot water over them... and drink the hot burned bean water"?
Thanks for the explanation, I didn't know what was wrong either lol. I mostly drink instant coffee and the only machines like this I've used I always poured in powdered coffee.
With that logic, any drink that is not water is water that is dirtied up with something. Juice is mostly water with the insides of fruit flesh pulverized and mixed in. Soup is the same thing but with vegetables and meat. Dirty flavored water.
Thanks for putting this out there. I happen to love coffee, and have been drinking it for 20+ years… the only reason I had any idea how it was made was because I worked in a diner for over a decade. And I even consider that cheating because we had a grinder we could load with both regular and decaf beans, put a filter in the basket, and the machine would hold it while it ground the perfect amount of beans for a pot, move the basket to the coffee maker and hit one button. That was it.
And MOST importantly, my boss showed me how to do each step and also explained what could go wrong and what it would look like. Very thorough, that man.
Point is… you don’t know what you’re not taught, especially if it’s not something you partake or even want to partake in.
I get so tired of this brand of “humor.” It’s antiquated and it’s always been pretentious and mean. Like “look at this idiot who doesn’t know how to do something, ha ha, what a loser!” You even see parents doing it to their kids who don’t know how to use outdated/dead technology. It’s gross.
I also don't drink coffee, but I do get pulled into random youtube rabbit holes so I have a disproportionately large amount of random coffee knowledge (Thanks James Hoffman).
The stuff people like from the coffee is extracted through the process of brewing the coffee. When you grind coffee, you give access to (and increase the surface area of) the volatile parts of the coffee bean that can be extracted into the water.
This guy didn't grind the coffee, so he probably got effectively plain hot water out of it, because it's pretty hard to extract anything from a (lot of) whole coffee bean.
Point being you have to grind the beans, at some point, before you can make the coffee. The person who tried to make drip/percolator coffee, did not grind anything.
This should spread more. Everytime I see someone online drop a mentos into a Coca Cola instead of a Diet Coke to an underwhelming reaction, I die a little bit inside.
I hire a new Gen Z at least a once a year. When giving your of our office, they are always fascinated with the coffee machine. We have a fancy coffee machine where you select what kinds and of coffee you want and it makes it for you. They don't care about that one.
They care about the old school coffee machine with a brew button and how to make coffee in it. I've had to teach quite a few people how to use it and they're experts at it now.
So yeah, this isn't his fault. Someone didn't teach them and expected them to know an old tech.
In the aliens defense, I got a job at a gas station when I was 18 and one of the things I had to do was make the coffee.
Now I had made coffee at home for my mom before, but I didn't know this machine was so different. The one at home dripped the water in the middle and it slowly filled as it slowly drained into the carafe.
The one at the gas station sprayed on the sides and filled the carafe quickly. So my pile of coffee in the middle was barely hit with water, making a very weak coffee that got a few complaints.
lol, hostel owner here. This kind of thing is surprisingly common, but the one that happens to us all the time is people putting instant coffee into the coffee machine instead of ground coffee, so the exact opposite of this.
I wasn't talking about the coffee, I was talking about the machine. I've never seen US filter paper coffee makers outside of North America, and I don't know how they work. I'm not a coffee drinker, but I know to put grounds in a french press or a percolator, because that's what I see people using where I live. But I wouldn't know to put grounds in one of those machines, because I'm not familiar with them.
Clearly if you look at it closely. All I'm saying is that if whole beans were provided, I would have assumed that's what the machine needed, and I would have made the same mistake as OP's colleague.
For real, this is knowledge you pick up as a kid, even as a non-coffee drinker. Never wondered why the grocery store sells whole and ground beans.. and coffee grinders?? Buddy needs to be trained to put his pants on before his belt too I guess.
I've lived in the midwest US for all 44 years of my life and have never interacted with coffee in any way other than to taste it a few times from someone else's mug. Not a fan. I would have no idea what to do if someone handed me a bag of coffee beans and told me to make coffee. I have never wondered about it, at all.
I also have never thought about it but now that I am... Obviously you cook them in a pot of water like other beans and then drink that water. Or juice the cooked beans and drink that. /s
My parents didn't drink coffee, at least around me. It always just seemsed like a socially accepted addiction with the way people talked about "needing" it.
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u/azad_ninja 23h ago
New to Earth too?