I have mentioned before the evil menace that is the unknown person I call The Design Guy. He is an especially evil madman who, by little tricks of broken design, is bent on slowly and methodically driving normal people (using myself as a benchmark of course) insane. Today I am going to talk about one of his evil designs: the standard coffee maker carafe.

What you say? You haven’t noticed anything wrong with the carafe? It is the hallmark of The Design Guy that he is insidious and subtle. Think about this for a minute, when you use one of those plastic tea pitchers you can pour liquid out of it at the rate of a gallon per second without spilling a drop. You could put out a fire with it and not spill any.

Try that with a coffee carafe. By the time you have your cup half full you’ll need to start another pot while you mop the floor. In fact, I can pee faster than I can pour coffee out of one of those. On a cool morning the coffee at the bottom of my cup has already gone icy by the time I get coffee to the top of the cup.

Here’s the thing, I don’t like coffee much. When I’m pouring coffee it is because I am:

A. Sleepy.

B. Cold.

C. In a hurry.

D. Need to crap.

E. Switching from type B to type A for the morning commute.

F. All of the above.

I am most definitely not having a sensuous, slow moment with the coffee. I’m not filming a remake of Nine and a Half Weeks or pretending to. If I want to do that, I’m probably not going to work and coffee breath is not exactly a good start for that anyway. No, I need my coffee to come out like a fire hose without dripping. And it’s the 21^st century, I know we have the technology.

E.W.

I’m also beginning to suspect that the coffee dribble cup I have (which amazingly only dribbles when I’m wearing a non-black shirt) is the work of The Design Guy.