How to Lose Three Weeks Over a Coffee Maker ☕️

The question isn't "do I need a new coffee pot."

The question is: how long can a person look at the same coffee pot before their brain snaps in the kitchen at 6:03 a.m.

Mine was a Black & Decker that had been here since before I could prove it. The plastic on the handle had gone from black to a sort of nicotine-yellow, and one of the feet had worn down so badly that the whole thing tilted slightly to the left, like it was perpetually exhausted with me. The "on" light hadn't worked in years. You just learned to listen for the gurgle. If it gurgled, it was on. If it wasn't gurgling, you had forgotten to plug it in again. This was a perfectly workable system.

And yet, for the last eight months, every morning I would stand there, bleary, pouring water into its crusty reservoir and think: I could upgrade this.

I should have known I was in trouble the day I googled "best drip coffee maker" on my phone while still in bed. I was not looking for a coffee maker. I was looking to see if other people were as unhinged about coffee makers as I was about to become. Within ten minutes I was in a subreddit where a grown man had posted a 1,400-word review comparing the showerhead dispersion patterns of two machines. I read all 1,400 words. I hated that I read all 1,400 words.

From there it was a freefall. Wirecutter. Amazon reviews sorted by "most recent." The "answered questions" section. You would not believe the volume of panic in the questions section of a $90 coffee pot. People asking if it fits under their cabinet. People asking if the carafe dribbles. People asking if they can use tap water. I was becoming one of these people. I was actively trying not to be one of these people, which only made it worse.

The internal debate consumed an embarrassing amount of my life. A new one would be forty dollars. No, seventy. No, the one with the thermal carafe was ninety-five. Ninety-five dollars to make the same brown water that the left-leaning foot-pot had been making with zero drama. That was absurd. Unconscionable. I was not going to spend ninety-five dollars on a coffee pot.

So I spent three weeks thinking about it instead. Three weeks of waking up, looking at the yellow handle, and doing complex mental math: cost per cup over five years. How much space in the trash for the old one. Whether the new one would wake up the dog with its beep. Whether I would miss the specific way the old carafe poured, which was actually not great, but was the way I knew. I tried to talk myself out of it. I tried to talk myself into it. I got annoyed with myself for talking to myself about a coffee pot.

Eventually, at 11:47 p.m. on a Wednesday, in my socks on the couch with the brightness turned all the way down on my phone like I was buying something illicit, I clicked "Buy Now."

The moment the order confirmation popped up, I was hit with immediate and overwhelming regret. Not buyer's remorse in the abstract. Specific, physical regret. I wanted to un-click it. I stared at the tracking number for two days straight, hoping in vain that by some glitch in the universe it would just disappear.

When the box showed up, it sat in my entryway for a solid week. I didn't mention it. I just stepped around the comically large cardboard box every time I left the house, as if ignoring it would somehow void the purchase. Finally I had to deal with it because the recycling truck was coming and I was not about to haul a coffee pot box to the curb in February.

Unpacking it was its own ordeal. It came wrapped in so much molded plastic that I spent ten minutes trying to free it, slicing my thumb on one of the little tabs in the process. The instruction booklet was twenty pages long. For a drip coffee maker. I refused to read it. The old one had one button. If this needed a flowchart, I was going to be mad.

I made the first pot with a mixture of spite and curiosity. It brewed. It beeped once, politely. The coffee tasted... fine. Weirdly fine. The carafe didn't dribble on the counter. The water reservoir had a nice, clear window so you could see how much was left, which is the kind of small thing that becomes obnoxious once you realize you spent your whole life guessing.

The old pot is still in the basement. I have no idea why I haven't gotten rid of it. I open the basement door sometimes, see its stupid tilted body sitting next to a defunct Shop-Vac, and feel a little guilty for abandoning it. But mostly I just go back upstairs, pour another cup from the new one, and try not to think about the ninety-five dollars for at least a few minutes.

It makes coffee. That's all it does. And somehow, despite all of that, I'm still a little mad about it.