The Aerie
Fourteen years ago, April of 1991, I started a job at the University of Minnesota. The desk that I was given had not been cleaned - the last owner had taken most of their personal belongings, but left a lot of papers and boxes and just plain crap under and around the desk. Actually it was pretty disgusting. I found a can of that horrid lemon-foam desk cleaner and scrubbed sticky who-knows-what off the bulky brown wood, further chipping away the finish.
Discarding some cobwebby cardboard boxes and crumpled paper bags, I came across a coffee maker and coffee mug.
The coffeemaker was a squared C-shaped device, and the cup and cone wedged into it. The coffeemaker, mug, and filter cone all fit together snugly.
The cup had clearly belonged to another programmer like myself, because it said "Don't Mess with my Software" in funky dot-matrix characters, on a design resembling the green-barred paper commonly found in dot-matrix printers.
When I finished cleaning my desk I took the coffeemaker and mug into the washroom and cleaned them thoroughly. The coffeemaker looked like it was about to fall apart at any time, and the burner was scored with rust and cooked coffee.
I had a coffee cup of my own, and I felt a little weird about using some stranger's cup, so I tried swapping cups and discovered something interesting: the coffeemaker only worked with the cup that came with it. My cup was too large, and it wouldn't fit with the filter. Another cup I tried later was too small, causing the hot water sputtering from the coffeemaker to splatter all around its base.
Only the cup that came with the coffeemaker worked correctly - fitting the plastic cone just tightly enough that no hot water spattered.
So I used the mug and the coffeemaker, and soon came to like it. As the years passed, my dot-matrix mug became more and more quaint, and finally nostalgic. My kids have no idea what the design is supposed to mean, while computer geeks my own age were reminded of the bygone days when a 1200 baud printer was the Latest Thing. Only a few accountants, printing checks on special carbon paper printers, still have dot-matrix green-bar paper anymore.
The other day I was pouring tea for my kids at snack time. I'm a lucky dad whose kids - American kids, that is - like tea. It's cheap, it's good for you, and it doesn't even have sugar - although they often take steps to rememdy that situation.
So I poured tea for the kids, and then grabbed my "Don't Mess with My Software" mug. I usually left it downstairs in my office with my coffeemaker, but I'd just pulled it out of the dishwasher.
I put in the teabag, poured the water, and picked up the cup.
There was a click that I felt in my fingers, and the sound of water spattering the floor. My "Don't Mess with My Software" cup had cracked, pouring tea all over the floor. The solid ceramic mug had failed to outlast the dilapidated coffeemaker that I had found with it.
After taking a final snapshot, I sadly disposed of my good old coffeemug. Then I set about finding its replacement.
Now, we're not short of mugs around here. Everytime I see one of those late-night charity commercials asking if you could give just fifteen cents so that a child in a third world country could have a ceramic novelty mug, I feel terribly guilty. So I figured I'd find one or two that might fit snugly into the coffeemaker.
I went through every mug on the shelf, every mug hanging from the hooks, and every mug tucked away in the back of the cabinets. Nothing. Every mug was either too large or too small. Finally, on a back hook, I found one mug that fit. So the good news is that I found a new mug to replace my cool "Don't Mess with My Software" mug. The bad news is that it's, well... it's rather less cool than my old one...