Thursday, April 07, 2016
Preparation vs crapification
Preparation pays dividends beyond emergencies.
Couple weeks ago my old coffeemaker stopped working. So I switched to a trick I'd developed during the 8-day power outage last year. Use the glass pot and 'basket' in the coffeemaker, but boil the water in a separate old percolator. During the power outage I was using my propane stove; now the electric stove does the boiling. After a few days I improved the Outage technique to make GOOD coffee, better than the automatic gadget ever made. Bring the water up to 180 degrees as measured by thermocouple, then pour carefully into the basket, keeping the basket full so all the grounds can steep as long as possible.
Out of inertia I checked the nearby Walmart for a proper replacement. Walmart no longer has the same Proctor-Silex, and doesn't have any non-digital coffeemakers at all. So I ordered a new Mr Coffee non-digital unit from Ebay. It arrived yesterday. I threw away the old unit and eagerly tried the new one this morning.
BLEAH.
The new Mr Coffee, like all new stuff, is too fat to fit in the same space. And like all new stuff it's made of Plastic Of Colour, which means you can't see the dirty parts to clean properly. And the resulting coffee is TERRIBLE. The flow is too fast and the temperature is too high. Tastes burned and weak.
Crapification at work. Each new "improvement" makes the device harder to use, harder to fit into a small space, harder to clean, and worse for its intended purpose.
So I grabbed the old machine out of the trashbin just in time (today is trash day) and returned to the Outage Method for GOOD coffee.
Now that I know HOW to make good coffee the next step is to simplify and de-emergency-ize the process. There are quite a few 'filter holder' gadgets available, some of which fit directly on a thermos.
Few days later, after trying one of those 'filter holder' gadgets without satisfaction, decided to get REAL SIMPLE. I know that the existing plastic basket works fine, so just USE it. Skip the part of the Proctor-Silex that doesn't work, use the part that does work.
Out of inertia I checked the nearby Walmart for a proper replacement. Walmart no longer has the same Proctor-Silex, and doesn't have any non-digital coffeemakers at all. So I ordered a new Mr Coffee non-digital unit from Ebay. It arrived yesterday. I threw away the old unit and eagerly tried the new one this morning.
BLEAH.
The new Mr Coffee, like all new stuff, is too fat to fit in the same space. And like all new stuff it's made of Plastic Of Colour, which means you can't see the dirty parts to clean properly. And the resulting coffee is TERRIBLE. The flow is too fast and the temperature is too high. Tastes burned and weak.
Crapification at work. Each new "improvement" makes the device harder to use, harder to fit into a small space, harder to clean, and worse for its intended purpose.
So I grabbed the old machine out of the trashbin just in time (today is trash day) and returned to the Outage Method for GOOD coffee.
Now that I know HOW to make good coffee the next step is to simplify and de-emergency-ize the process. There are quite a few 'filter holder' gadgets available, some of which fit directly on a thermos.
Few days later, after trying one of those 'filter holder' gadgets without satisfaction, decided to get REAL SIMPLE. I know that the existing plastic basket works fine, so just USE it. Skip the part of the Proctor-Silex that doesn't work, use the part that does work.
Labels: defensible spaces
¶ 10:27 AM
