A little while ago, maybe 6 months or so, we got a new coffee maker, a Grind and Brew automatic coffee maker.  The idea is nice: you fill the hopper on top with your beans, select your grind and strength, set the time you want the maker to brew your coffee, and away you go.  Each night, you fill the resevoir with water and clean out the filter.  Pretty simple.  And it is definitely nice to wake up in the morning  to a freshly brewed cup of coffee.

However, I guess the engineers didn’t plan for an idiot of my caliber:  three times now, the latest being on Thursday, I have woken up to a very powerful aroma of coffee.  You might think that is a good thing, to wake up to such a great smell filling the house.  But, for it to be that strong indicates that I have, yet again, forgotten to replace the carafe in the coffee maker.  It is smart enough to have a stopper so that, when the carafe is not in place, it doesn’t let coffee out of the bottom of the filter.  However, that only works for so long, as it doesn’t stop it from filling up the filter.  If you brew enough coffee — more than just a cup or so — the filter fills up and coffee starts pouring out the top, down the side of the maker, onto the counter, down the cabinets, into the drawers (which, conveniently, are where we keep our wash cloths) and onto the floor.  So, instead of waking to a nice pot of coffee, I awoke to a big mess to clean up as I rush off to work. This has happened three times now.  I think Lisa is likely to ban me from using the coffee maker in the future.

The moral: there is always someone more idiotic than the engineers ever account for.