Postmodern Coffee

I worked for several years during and immediately after university at a Christian camp and conference center, whereat I performed such divers jobs as serving food, hurdling kids down zip-lines at outrageous speeds, keeping kids from shooting each other with bows and arrows, keeping kids from shooting their counselors and pastors with bows and arrows, and scrubbing dishes. Glamorous work, what?

This coffee is relatively hot.

Anyway, I was working in the kitchen one morning, at something like 5:30 A.M., when I would certainly have been dead to the world if I had my druthers (my druthers being, alas, something which is so often withheld from me). On this particular occasion, I was propping my eyelids open with toothpicks and attempting to make coffee for the marauding hoards which were about to storm the gates and demand to be fed breakfast.

We used those big, square, two-gallon coffee pots like you see at any restaurant, and campers and counselors could grab a cup and get as much coffee as they wanted (which was usually a whole heck of a lot, and this coming from me). I was brewing four pots of regular, for the normal people, and two pots of decaf for those aberrant few who always manage somehow to sneak out without their handlers. Our pots for decaf coffee were marked by orange handles, as is the custom of the civilized world, as though to communicate by that particular monochrome what Dante might have rendered more colorfully as, “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here,” or something of the kind.

So, I dutifully got out the orange-emblazoned coffee-pots, and began brewing. I stared blearily at the coffee-pots through bloodshot eyes. Something in my brain began to whir.

I blinked a couple of times. Probably it was nothing.

I stared some more and blinked again.

Somewhere in the dark recesses of my sleep-deprived mind, a cog caught hold of a gear, something turned and I suddenly realized that although I had used the decaf coffee pots, I hadn’t actually used the decaf coffee packets. I had filled the decaf pots with regular coffee.

As I stood there, delving into the recesses of my bedraggled, pre-noon mind, and searching the depths of my memory, it occurred to me that, although I had prepared the coffee for the camp dozens of times, I couldn’t for the life of me remember ever actually opening a packet of decaf coffee.

Oops.

It’s okay though, right? I mean, it’s labeled as decaf, so it must be! In fact, until I realized my mistake, I firmly believed - nay, I felt - that the coffee was decaf. This makes it so. It’s in the decaf pot. It has an orange handle. What more could anyone want? It’s all a matter of identification, and that coffee was clearly identifying as decaf. End of story. Case dismissed. Move along. Nothing to see here.

Still, somehow I couldn’t manage to shake the feeling that, insist though I might that the coffee was decaf, those campers were gonna be wired.

Maybe that’s why they’d been pulling the fire-alarm every night. Live and learn.

If only I had some kind of application for this story, wherein I would emerge from this personal tale of woe possessing some perspicacious oracle pertinent to our modern times, shining a piercing light into the cloudy murk of the current philosophy and illuminating the fundamental flaws in the way the concepts of truth and absolutes are conceived of in our own era, or some such thing.

Nope, I got nothing.

Oh well.