An Outrage (Well Not Quite)

Earlier this week I received the following e-mail from our office administrator:

Good Morning. Community Coffee will no longer be able to supply our soft drinks so we are looking for a new vendor for our coffee & soft drinks. Standard Coffee service will be out this morning around 8:30 a.m with samples of their coffee placed in the kitchen - It will be here all day. If you are one of our coffee drinkers please sample the coffee sometime today and send me a short, quick email with your opinion. The samples they are bringing are supposed to be comparable to what we have been receiving from Community. Thanks for your time and cooperation.

It is fairly safe to say that I drink more coffee that anyone else in the entire office. Not everyone even drinks coffee, and of those who do, I drink WAY more. And anyone from the south may be willing to testify to the fact that Community Coffee is hands down, the best coffee in the world. Community Coffee to a Southerner (in my opinion) is the standard by which all other coffees are measured.

So when I received the e-mail I was immediately heart-broken. Judging by the wording of the e-mail I deduced that I had two options:

1) Standard Coffee
2) Javarama Coffee

Both are products of Standard Coffee Company (as an interesting side note, until we bought our house in April we lived across the street from the owner of Standard Coffee Company) and both fall short of being "comparable to what we have been receiving from Community." Needless to say, I was disappointed because I felt that there should have been a third option:

3) Keep using Community

So we had the taste test, Standard won over Javarama (I'd like to go on record to say that while both are not as good as Community, Javarama was absolute rubbish) and we are now drinking a new brand of coffee in the office.

Normally I would walk around complaining, pissing and moaning because I have a hard time seeing the sense in the change, but the truth is I do see the sense in the change. Because Community Coffee Company will not be providing our soft drinks any longer, it doesn't make financial sense to have two vendors providing what one vendor can.

Also, no one else seems to notice that there is any difference between Community Coffee and Standard Coffee but me, so I don't want to be the one guy causing problems. Truthfully, I think with enough time I'll adapt and get used to the new brand.

At the last office I worked in, they served Mellow Joy Coffee. Mellow Joy was a popular southern coffee brand years ago as I understand it, and eventually Community Coffee bought the rights to the name and recipe and ceased production and distribution. Sometime in 2003 I think, the rights lapsed and someone else bought them and in turn began production and distribution again. When this happened, a number of business owners who had fond memories of their parents and grandparents drinking Mellow Joy when they were children thought it would be great to switch to it. I am here to tell you that Mellow Joy coffee is one of the most foul tasting, awful coffee brews I have ever had the misfortune to taste. The only brand I've had that is consistently worse than Mellow Joy is the sorry excuse for coffee which is served by the PJ's Coffee & Tea Company. I wanted coffee every day in the office though, and so I drank the Mellow Joy. After a month or so, I got accustomed to it and didn't mind nearly as much.

So to make a long story short, it's been a week of tolerance and adjustment for me, and I thought I'd share the experience with you guys.