Snow Experience

Eagle by Alexander Calder
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For over a year now, the Seattle Art Museum has been turning the lot immediately to the southwest of my office building into a "sculpture park," where citizens would be free to mill about amongst some nominal artwork. The grand opening isn't until this Saturday, but yesterday there was a "sneak preview" for friends and donors to the museum. I haven't been impressed with the works I've seen so far and was much more entertained over the handwringing this past fall when the local cement mixers guild went on strike, bringing a halt to the entire project. There was quite the crowd yesterday, most of them crammed into the pavilion where there's a coffee stand and warmth.

Bus stop by my house
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This morning I woke up to find fresh snow pouring from the sky. I read the websites and discovered that school wasn't closed but only two hours late (a half hour later, I would be told that schools had been closed) so I dressed and went to the bus stop. To wait. The bus was 20 minutes overdue when one of the other people I regularly commute with on the bus stopped by in his car and offered me a ride. I took it. Funny, he was listening to the same radio station I was. The ride in wasn't too bad; his car had all wheel drive and after getting down the hill everything was good. The office was mostly empty today; about half the employees called in.

"Eagle" this morning
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When I got in, the city was mostly at a standstill. The cops had started closing off streets that were too steep and dangerous to drive, and the buses didn't seem to be running at all. I walked all the way from Pike Place Market to Denny Way, a little over a mile. It wasn't too bad, although the sidewalk was quite slippery. As I was walking by the silent sculpture park, I took another picture of the big statue that dominates the skyline there. We inside the building have nicknamed it "elephant," because it looks so much more like that than it does an "eagle."

The bad design of an everyday thing

A couple of weeks ago my company replaced the existing set of coffee carafes with a new set. The old set was very beat up and probably deserved replacing, although there were no leaks and no noticeable degredation in performance.

Ever since then, however, getting coffee has come with an added level of stress. When pouring yourself a cup of coffee, I'll press down on the dispense lever and the machine may or may not dispense some coffee but, long before it reaches a full eight ounce cup it starts to cough and sputter. It's out. For some reason when that happens, my stress level seems to shoot upward dramatically and I curse the damned thing. This is an almost universal reaction to the new carafes; everyone feels this way about them, but nobody is quite sure why. This never happened with the old carafes. I've figured out what makes them stressful.

The new carafes are hydraulically fed. You pump a lever to push air into the carafe chamber, which in turn pushed the coffee out. In the old carafes, it was gravity fed: the lever was at the bottom, and you pushed it to open a simple valve that would dump the coffee. I suppose the new carafes, having to hole at the bottom, are less troublesome should a leak develop in the valve, since essentially all that means is that the carafe doesn't work, but at least it doesn't leak either.

The design of the old carafes allowed for a window above the valve that would tell you exactly how much coffee was left. The new ones do not have this feature, and therefore running out of coffee is an unpleasant and stress-inducing surprise.

Sure, you ran out of coffee with the old one, but you knew before you pressed the lever that that was likely to happen. You could even place bets with yourself based upon experience if there was enough left for one more cup. Emptying the carafe was both anticipated and gameable. You also knew, if you had just emptied the carafe, that it was your responsibility to refill it; no such responsibility is communicated with the new ones.

This could all be solved with a simple addition that would probably add two bucks to the manufacturing process: a thin tube flush with the surface of the carafe showing you how much coffee was left. Without it, the carafes seem almost optimally designed to frustrate and stress the user.