The Sugar Bowl

I’m sitting at home today taking a practice MCAT, which means I have nothing to write about. Instead, I am going to show you a preview of the treat I have in store for tomorrow. My friend Brandon Basso, who is a graduate student in mechanical engineering at Cal, wrote an article about time management. It’s long, so I instead of writing a long intro when I post it tomorrow, I’m going to post an email I received from Brandon about a year ago. It explains a lot. -Ben

So you guys might find this story funny.  I’m a pretty big coffee drinker but since i moved to my new place about two months ago, i hadn’t had a single good cup of coffee.  Every time i tried to make one, it would start out tasting ok but then would get really salty and gross.  I had cleaned out my coffee maker and at first thought that I may have left some soap inside.  So i completely disassembled it and cleaned it again–no luck, still salty coffee.  This was bothering me so much that one morning ( I have to teach Matlab discussion every day at 8am) i actually threw my coffee cup at the sidewalk, and yelled something like "[not appropriate for ben’s blog]"–i was pissed.  So the next logical thing to assume was that an oxide had formed on the inside of my stainless steel coffee urn and was reacting with the coffee.  This is plausible because coffee is acidic –> reactive, and it would explaining the time delay in the salty taste since reactions take time.  So i cleaned my cup out as well, but no luck, so i resigned myself to drinking salty coffee for the past few weeks.  Last weekend i was home making some breakfast with my roommates.  Just as I was spooning some sugar into my coffee cup, Deena commented, "you put salt in your coffee?"  yes folks, salt in my coffee.  I almost never stir, its just not my style, so this imageexplains the time element.  I had in fact gone through 1 pound of coffee and a crap load of salt.  I actually went through so much salt that i distinctly remember Deena commenting about a month ago, "we really go thought a lot of salt" to which i replied "hmmm, never seen the salt."  Let this be a lesson to you all: don’t stay in school, you get stupider.  on the plus side I’ve rediscovered good coffee and have switched to brown sugar, just to be sure.

Published by Ben

Ben Collins Professional Triathlete

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6 Comments

  1. I’m guessing Brandon is booksmart. Hilarious, I would have probably dribbled coffee as I laughed at this but I don’t have any which is sort of sad right now. Good luck Ben. If it helps any, I got 35 out of 36 right on my California State driving test last week. Beat that!

  2. OMG. totally something I would do. . .if I drank coffee, instead of carcinogenic diet coke. Too much school or too much training definitely can definitely make you dumber! The combo is even worse–on that note, hope the practice MCAT goes well!

  3. Along similar lines, my roomates recently decided to move our milk and OJ from the very conspicuous front bottom shelf of our fridge to the door. I found it this morning, after 2 weeks of wondering where I put them. Did I leave them at the grocery store? Not likely, I walk about a half mile home and definitely remember when I get milk and OJ–very heavy. The OJ was awesome, the milk was bad.

  4. That is hilarious. Oh, Berkeley people. I kind of miss being around people like that. I think that’s called “over-thinking the problem.” 🙂

    After laughing a lot, then I thought “that is so gross.”

    Thank god I don’t put sugar in my coffee. Though spoiled milk in your coffee is arguably worse. Ugh.

  5. Oh God, am I really “a Berkeley person”? I think I like absent-minded over-thinker better.

    Thankfully I use half-and-half, it lasts much longer than milk, but is unfortunately smaller and more difficult to find in the fridge.

  6. Being a “Berkeley person” is a good thing. I really thought the whole “must be an oxide that formed…yup…” was awesome. It brought me back to being around people like that all the time and how creative people’s ideas could be for trying to understand why stuff happened.

    The problem with half/half is that it can ONLY be used for coffee and therefore tends to go bad before I can use it all; milk has multiple purposes and therefore has a higher probability of me being able to use it all before it goes bad. 🙂

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