The vending machine promised me a tasteful blend of coffee and chocolate in my Cafe Mocha, but this is neither tasteful nor chocolatey. Nor coffee-y, for that matter. This is what happens when I run out of money and can’t get coffee from Coffee Cart Man. Grossness. I guess it’s like the coffee equivalent of turning to crack. You might ask, “Why would you, a basically sane person and a great lover of coffee, purchase such dreck?” My answer would be that I could purchase it with the 65 cents that magically appeared at the bottom of my pocketbook. So I am ashamed, and also a bit afraid of the round white chunks floating at the top, but I need my coffee. Maybe I should have hedged my bets on another buyback from Coffee Cart Man by wearing something sexier than a Powerpuff Girls t-shirt and baggy jeans. But I didn’t think ahead.

Obviously. It’s pretty pathetic that this happens every time I get to the end of a pay cycle. Tomorrow at 8 or 9 a.m., Ill be X-amount of dollars richer, but I need to remember that I still have to budget. Because I really don’t want to experience this madness again. Buying two dollars worth of gas at a time is depressing, especially when I am excited that the needle on the gauge actually moves to the E, instead of hovering ominously below. And Babz is not going to let me bum cigarettes forever. She’s already been fixing me with The Glare.

And really, the coffee situation. I guess I am an official addict, because this week I’ve gone without food, and without gas, in order to get my fix from Coffee Cart Man. But you know, as grateful as I am that he provides for me, why in the world do we not have a coffeemaker here at my job? Every other place Ive worked had community coffee. I thought that was part of the deal. Part of the compensation for being an office cliche — the bottomless mug of coffee. Yes, many of the times, the community coffee hurt my stomach. And yes, the people who’d leave only half an inch in the pot without making more incurred my indignant wrath, but the coffee was there.

But not now. And now my machine coffee has cooled, so I’m not even getting that invigorating warmth. Nothing. It’s sadness in a paper cup. So next pay cycle, I am going to try very hard to budget, because my love affair with coffee is way too precious for me to be mocking it in this way.

© March 31, 2005