You Get What You Pay For

“You get what you pay for.” Have truer words been spoken? I mean, if you go to buy a car and pay $200 you can’t honestly expect to drive away with a brand new Porsche, right? So the same would apply for a cup of coffee. If you plug in $2.50 into a coffee vending machine in a hostel you shouldn’t expect a great cup of java. Juan Valdez (famous Columbian coffee bean picker) is not back there somewhere in the machine grinding the beans, he is off in the mountains with his donkey picking beans for coffee machines far far better than ours.

The other day a snotty young woman came up to the desk with her cup of ‘coffee’ and told me to look at it because it had a thin layer of foam on the top and it should just be black. I asked her if she tried stirring it and she replied “That’s not the point. It shouldn’t have any foam on top, it’s a short black. There is something wrong with your machine.” I was going to make a comment about me being short but not black but it was obvious this woman was in the grips of caffeine with drawl and wouldn’t find it funny.

I grabbed the keys, opened the machine and couldn’t see anything wrong so I set up to make another short black and the same thing happened, a thing layer of foam formed on top. I stirred it but it just kept coming back like a bad guest. I told her the machine is fine and this is the cup of coffee it makes.
“It is awful! It is so weak, I don’t like the taste. It’s not like the stuff you get at a café.”
“Of course it’s not; it’s a coffee vending machine in a hostel. Do you SEE any biscotti?
I gave her two free cups of short black coffee.
“Well I guess it will have to do.”
“One time my friend dumped his coffee on a painted floor to see how long it would take the coffee to eat through the paint…..under 3 hours. Can you believe that?”