I don't drink Coffee

When I started at Epic, we all had a lot of responsibilities. One of the responsibilities was rotating “kitchen” duty. We didn’t have to clean, but we did need to stock the kitchen, and if the coffee pot was empty when arriving, you’d need to start the pot so that others were properly caffeinated. Someone would fetch a large supply of canned (non-alcoholic of course!) drinks. Kitchen duty included stocking the refrigerator.

WE HAD SUGARED DRINKS

This was the era before “sparkling mineral water” and other drinks replaced the sugared soda. We had the usual suspects for software developers from Coke to Mountain Dew.

But, what I hated the most wasn’t stocking the refrigerator: it was end of day coffee pot cleanup. I don’t drink coffee and never have. So, it was not a favorite duty of mine to clean the pot at the end of the day. I likely did a very poor job. The modern Epic campus has nice coffee makers — easy to fill and go (and they make a very large amount at once). Young Epic had the old-school glass coffee pots, nothing fancy.

Eventually, these tasks fell to someone else and the rotation stopped.

I’ll talk more in a later post about the less unusual responsibilities I had during the era when employees wore a lot of different hats to keep the company operating.

What unexpected tasks have you had to do as part of your job?