Tempest in a K-cup
Why people won’t dump their Keurig coffee pods and other examples of discourteous behaviour
At my workplace, there is a shared Keurig coffee machine in the cafeteria. It’s a busy machine and as with most things you find in a shared space, there is an unwritten code that the person using it should clean up after her- or himself.
Except that there is someone who always leaves behind a spent coffee pod inside the closed machine. That means people like me who follow have to pull out the used little plastic pod, or so-called K-cup, and dump it so we can use our own.
This probably shouldn’t amount to hill of coffee beans in our crazy world, right? Not in a world challenged by big issues like polarized politics, the rift between rich and poor and the environment.
Except that it does, including its impact on our environment that even the inventor of the K-cup regrets having unleashed billions of his little Frankensteins into the world’s landfills.
This isn’t about the wastefulness of the K-cup culture. It’s not even a rant about discourteous coffee users.
No, it appears that the harried, absent-minded coffee drinker is a symptom of our distracted, tech-tortured and ‘multi-tasking’ world.
Let’s start with the distracted part.
Walk into a stranger or group of people and you’ll see all their distractions in action: The solitary kid looking down on her cellphone as she crosses an intersection without looking at the traffic; the group of ‘friends’ sitting at a table, each one of them looking down on his phone; people who can’t answer more than one question in an email or text.
Research is revealing that even among so-called digital natives, cellphone use has undermined face-to-fact interactions as people multi-task between their devices and other humans.
What’s also interesting is research on empathetic people and their devices, suggesting people who have more empathy towards others use less digital devices and social media. One researcher suggests a possible cause-and-effect relationship saying “perhaps frequently using social media can impair empathy an emotional intelligence.”
My guess is that the K-cup abandoner at my workplace was probably answering a text on his phone at the same time he was pulling his mug out from under the Keurig machine, an act he probably repeated dozens of times over the past few months.
He’s a multi-tasker after all and despite the spurious claims about the productivity benefits of this type of behaviour, so many people continue to juggle all these proverbial balls at once. Especially in an office.
There is evidence to suggest that multi-tasking behaviour itself may be a sign of lack of empathy in some individuals. Researchers in the UK, in fact, found a correlation between “high” multi-taskers and less brain density in the anterior cingulate cortex, the region that controls empathy, cognition and emotions.
In an open office environment such as mine, which is indeed a “terrible, horrible, no good, very bad idea,” the multi-tasking, tech-obsessed unempathetic oaf can be as annoying as the guy who always forgets to put the toilet seat down. (Or so I’ve been told.) There are the workers who text during meetings. There are those who engage in speaker conversations so we can all hear what we don’t want/need to hear.
They are all so damn busy getting things done that they don’t care about others who work close to them. They are like the aggressive drivers in the big trucks and SUVs — I call them people with 4x4 personalities — who would mow down a pedestrian or cyclist to get to the beer store quickly.
I get it. They are busy. We’re all busy. We all have appointments, deadlines, problems, challenges. We don’t have time to lift the lid of a Keurig machine and discard the K-cup.
But like a worker at a marketing company who recently cancelled a scheduled meeting between me and two colleagues with only two minutes notice, it isn’t right. In her case, the marketing minion said “something came up” and later elaborated that she had a “deadline” and couldn’t make it.
“We know all about deadlines here,” I deadpanned, reminding her I’ve worked in a deadline industry for more than a quarter century .
People who are too distracted to, as John Donne put it, involve themselves in mankind need to remember they don’t live on an island all alone. They need to slow down, stop even, and maybe do one thing at a time.
They need to get rid of their own fuckin’ K-cup.
Claudio D’Andrea has been writing and editing for newspapers, magazines and online publications for more than 30 years. You can read his stuff on LinkedIn and Medium.com and follow him on Twitter.
