Special delivery

A coffee bean’s life ends violently.

The ripened coffee cherry is plucked from a tree. Its remains are processed either with a fermented liquid or in the sun. The outer layers of peel and parchment are stripped away, baring its inner bean. That bean is roasted (over roasted if it’s sold by Starbucks) and ultimately ground to tiny bits, either by you, if you are a fancy person, or by a coffee company. And if that’s not enough, the ground up bits are run through steaming hot water.

Talk about beating a dead bean to death.

This horrible treatment went a step further for me recently when not only was the bean mistreated into caffeinated deliciousness, the box it was shipped in was horribly disfigured. In fact, I have never received a package so mutilated.

When I saw the giant puncture wound sealed with packing tape and the box’s dented corners, I couldn’t help but compassionately contemplate, “Who did this to you?”

It reminded me of that great parody commercial on Saturday Night Live from my college years that I still vividly recall. It was a delivery company called “Jiffy Express” that specializes in taking the blame for packages that the sender was late getting out. Truly genius.

I have supportive parents who contribute generously to my chemical dependence on caffeine. Each year, at either my birthday or Christmas, they supply me with what can only be classified in Southern parlance as a “heap” of ground coffee pods. I bring them into the office and make them available to my coworkers out of the goodness of my heart (and a desire to make them work harder and faster).

Recently, though, the gift cycle left me with a stretch of the year in which I was bereft of life-giving caffeine. I was forced to take out a second mortgage to purchase the pods myself to keep up the chemical dependency of me and my colleagues.

It’s all about supply and demand. What kind of drug dealer would I be if I got everyone hooked and then cut off the supply? So when the industrial-sized shipment of wholesale Maud’s coffee pods ran out, I had to resort to retail.

I tried a mix of flavors, including some pretty exotic ones. I inadvertently polarized the team with Community Coffee’s “Pecan Praline” flavor. (America really is a country divided, people.) Grant hated it. Morgan loved it. In fact, she liked it so much, she resorted to sneaking pods out of the bowl behind me while I clacked away furiously on my keyboard writing pithy LinkedIn updates and finding witty GIFs and memes to post on our Teams chat. Morgan doesn’t have to steal them. They are for public consumption. I guess she just likes the thrill of theft. (Note to self: better check the supply closet.)

For the record, I can take or leave the Pecan Praline flavor. For me, coffee is not about the taste. I drink it black like a sociopath. It is solely about the chemical boost, not any pleasure or Epicurean enjoyment.

I have cut back recently to two cups a day, one in the morning and one in the afternoon. If I’ve had a particularly rotten night of sleep, which sometimes happens with a new dog and allergy-season-affected spouse, I may have to indulge in a third cup. Usually my addiction is satiated with just the two.

My parents’ Maud’s pods are my secret productivity hack. That’s why it was so distressing to receive the damaged shipment. The entire production schedule of Oglethorpe University’s marketing and communications team is dependent on that case of coffee pods. Someone’s dereliction of duty in squishing my box of pods could bring our department’s work to a screeching halt.

Fortunately, when I opened up the box, most of the pods survived intact. I know, huge relief. One or two were broken open, releasing their contents to coat all of the pods with a dusting of grounds. Rather than be annoyed by this, I chose to think of it as a feature and not a bug. It made the coffee pods artisanal. Who doesn’t like artisanal coffee pods? We’re all hipsters now anyways, right?

I get it. With the sheer volume of shipping generated by online shopping, these things are bound to happen. But at some point in this process, a shipping company employee decided to just slap some packing tape on it rather than send it back and get a new package sent.

That’s the true revelation about our society in this morality tale. Someone didn’t want to take the time or responsibility to do the right thing. Instead, they just taped it up and sent it down the line to become someone else’s problem.

To be fair, I am drinking the coffee, and it tastes fine. I only lost a couple of pods out of the metric ton in the shipment. Maybe the lesson here is when your package is damaged, consider the ways it is a blessing.

Afterall, life can beat you up a bit during shipping, but in the end, it can taste just as good.