Alien vs. Manual

I’ve been craving an espresso for a couple of days now. Thing is, the huge espresso maker keeps sitting there staring back at me like a little alien, with arms and eyes poking out of it everywhere, all of its button and knobs, and I can see the coffee. I can see the friggin coffee in there. Problem is that I have no idea where the coffee goes in, or out for that matter. The catalogue is a piece of work. Click that, turn that, add water, wait for 3 minutes, turn that, now click that button, add coffee, set it to 5 min, click that, turn that knob, wait, now release that and turn that all the way. Well, I turned it alright, just before it fell off. I swear there’s a button in there that looked like it’s giving me the finger, except that after a while I saw that the knuckles where the coffee cup and the middle finger was the steam swirling out.

You know those movies when there’s this guy fighting an icky alien with projections sticking out of every inch of its gooey body, and the guy pulls a glowing sword out of nowhere and cuts off one of the gigantor’s arms with goo spraying out and the thing squeaking in horror? Yeah it was like that. Except that even then the goo, supposedly the coffee, wouldn’t come out just so the little alien would relish the pain in my eyes, almost as if it were screaming at  me: “Yes, I’m punctured you bloody vampire but you’re not getting one drop out of me mister!” And the only thing squeaking was my decaffeinated head trying to push laser rays out of my eyes to punch a hole into the coffee container and get it the hell out of there and right where it belongs, inside me, saturating every brain fold.

Oh well, I’m gonna have to read the manual.

Come to think of it, espresso makers are supposed to be user friendly aren’t they? They don’t have to be operated by bartenders. I mean, it should be easy if the bartenders can multitask the mind-boggling process of making coffee with the show they pull swishing the bottles into the air and all. Besides, that thing is there in every office, isn’t it? And the average Joe’s intelligence could not possibly get past the craftsmanship of fixing a stapler now could it? Meh.

Well that leads it to the inevitable conclusion, that being the fact that I’m either too dumb to operate it, or it’s too smart for the human race. Either way, I’m gonna have to read the manual.

It’s not in the company’s interest to manufacture it that complicated, or is it? You see it in some department store as you’re shopping, you’re in awe, you can almost taste the coffee just from looking at the thing, and oh what a thing it is. You buy it, fumbling through the manual and deciding to figure it out as you go, and in a couple of minutes the coffee is stuck there like a hostage and you dunno how to get it out, with your taste buds screaming out mercy in the middle of the desert that is your mouth, after being seduced by the relief of the  mirage that is the brown syrup. You end up with that freak of nat…technology, and no coffee. So, considering that most people that would care to buy an espresso maker are luxurious coffee addicts, they’d go into a frenzy and rush to the complains department of whatever store they got it out of – which is equivalent to the pill dispensing section in every rehab – are referenced back to the insurance and maintenance department of the manufacturing firm where an amiable guy with a tux rushes out to meet you, espresso paper cup in hand, listens diligently as he sips on it and asks the ultimate question, the one that solves it all…

“Have you read the manual?”