Programmers are machines that convert caffeine and sugar into code. All good software companies know this, and provide copious quantities of coffee and soft drinks to turn into code – and, of course, the higher quality the coffee and soft drinks, the better the code. So, if you offer instant coffee, you’re going to get code that looks a little bit like the real thing, is better than nothing and can pass for real coffee on a good day, but really isn’t all that great when you get down to it. On the other hand if you’ve got a grand’s worth of Gaggia espresso machine that grinds the beans on demand and turns out glorious shots of hot, dark liquid gold, then your code is going to be correspondingly well crafted and artisanal. Well, that’s the theory, anyway.

So, anyway. It was obviously a great problem to our company when, two weeks ago, the aforementioned Gaggia Coffee Robot went tits up and died. Productivity slumped. Caffeine withdrawal kicked in. There was very nearly a protest in the R+R room, except nobody could summon the energy or willpower to do it. In response to this, a coffee grinder and filter coffee machine was produced whilst the Gaggia was sent away for repairs. Now, normally when you make filter coffee, you stick a spoonful or two of coffee in the filter and drip the water through. If you’re a normal person, anyway. If you’re a Transitive employee, what you do is fill the filter up to the top with ground coffee, and pack it down, so that what drips out the bottom is the most viciously strong, bitter assault on your senses you’ve ever experienced. The taste isn’t as good as the espresso machine, and it gets through coffee beans like you wouldn’t believe, but it’s a damned sight better than instant.

Today, the coffee robot returned, to much applause; and with it came some statistics from the nice people at Gaggia. Since buying the machine, it has made over 25,000 cups of coffee. An average shot of espresso contains about 100mg of caffeine, so that’s 2.5kg of pure caffeine. The lethal dose of caffeine for an average, healthy adult is between 13 and 19 grams. So, in our office, we’ve made enough caffeine to kill somewhere between 131 and 192 people.

Sod software, we should go into the chemical warfare business.

This entry was posted on Friday, August 5th, 2005 at 12:37 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.