Cup heaters
Do you have a heater on your desk. Not underneath where one would expect to find such a thing. On the desk surface. Specifically to keep your coffee cup warm. For many years my office was located in a repurposed school building. Rooms that were the size of a small home side by side with far too many desks crammed into the available space. Once they banished the student population it became the refuge of the secretarial class. And because I spent far too many hours going underneath those desks to analyze and fix electrical problem I noticed something that I found to be peculiar. Every desk had a small round heating plate where someone could keep their cup of coffee warm through the many hours spent answering the telephone. I am not going to talk about the relative efficiency of this method because my desk did not have one. I learned to enjoy cold coffee. But what I did figure out is that someone at some point had brought one to work and everybody else had to have one. Nobody can climb to the top when one person has something that everyone else wants. Instead their request would go over to purchasing and they would buy them, one at a time. Not for me to preach efficiency here. What I still wonder years later is if these small heating pads actually did the job. I never heard someone say that their coffee was too hot or too cold. And when every desk has a heating pad that probably was not an option. Strangely we have one here at home. An artifact of a former lifestyle. When I want a cup of hot coffee I know how to find the machine. And coffee does not stay warm for very long so I am left wondering why we have this small pad in a world where there is no need. Is this habit or purpose? I will continue to study this to see if I can determine the cause and effect.
Read the rest of this entry »posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off on Cup heaters | 340 words
