Chemex is a good company. I have used their coffeemaker for years and find it makes excellent coffee -- and their customer service is great!
Awhile back, I set up a coffee-making corner in my department at work. The vending machine coffee is expensive and not all that great and other departments have their own coffeemakers, so why not?
It's a copy of my home method, with an electric water boiler, a Chemex (my spare from home) and a thermal carafe. My supervisor chipped in with official endorsement and a nice little counter-height table and the whole thing runs on beneficence* and the notion that people can contribute in kind if they feel it's worthwhile. We don't charge for coffee -- that would be competing with the vending people -- but users bring in coffee and filters and so on, and leave it there for others to use. What do they and I get out of it? Decent coffee, any time we can spare a couple of minutes to brew it. So far, it's working well; with a half-dozen coffee drinkers in the department, the user pool is small enough that everyone feels like a stakeholder. (You have to let go to make this work, and you can't have too many people involved; some of my peers are sloppier about coffeemaking than others, some prefer stronger or weaker coffee and it's vital to treat all these things as ordinary foibles and not dire offenses against How Things Should Be. Don't like what's in the carafe? Make more!)
Gathering the initial supplies, I needed some filters and ordered them (along with some swag) directly from Chemex. The box duly arrived...with a small forklifty fork-looking hole punched in it (and one of the boxes of filters) and missing the cork coasters. I e-mailed them, they asked for a photo of the damage and I sent a couple of snapshots in reply. Replacement filters and coasters arrived a couple of days later -- no quibbles, no fussing over details past establishing the damage. They made it right.
I'm impressed. Chemex is first-rate.
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* Beneficence is, roughly, the notion that "I've got mine and there's plenty left for others." My neighbors on each side and I chipped in to add gravel to our short driveways and about a third of our shared alley, from the farthest contributing house to the paved city street. There are several other houses along that third and yes, they got fresh gravel on the alley for free. So what? My neighbors and I got what we wanted and the additional traffic just helps pack down the gravel . That's beneficence. Some potholes showed up over the winter and I noticed someone added clay (Indiana dirt often has a lot of it) and when a couple of rains turned that into mud, someone filled the holes with fresh gravel. That's beneficence, too. There's no central authority, nobody is obliged to participate; people fix stuff because it benefits them and don't worry that other people might get some good from it, too. There are situations where this stuff works.
BUILDING A 1:1 BALUN
4 years ago
4 comments:
That's how things are supposed to work. In a prior job, our workplace functioned in a similar fashion. No one made a big deal of it. People just brought in whatever was needed. This was expanded to birthdays, other celebrations. Also when someone met with some difficulty or tragedy in their personal life. We just all pitched in. Some more than others, but no one was keeping score.
Way off-topic, but did you settle on a car yet?:
Scripps-Booth Bi-Autogo
:)
Ah, beneficence.
Evangelicals I know always pitch a fit when I bring up the Rabbinic portrait of Sodom. They can't comprehend the idea that Sodom's sins were not sexual. To the Rabbis, the central vice of Sodom was its rejection of beneficence. They condemned as the attitude of Sodom anyone who refused to do a favor which did not harm the favor performer in any way, the person who insisted on his just due, but did not care if others were hurt when he did so.
In fact, the full Midrashic portrait of Sodom reads like a portrait of Trump. Immigrants bad, the only standard of virtue was wealth, the law perverted to hurt the poor and the weak. But it all traces back to the idea that "what is mine is mine", and that is all that matters.
Monty: Kinda want. Or a cyclecar of some kind. But they're very costly and not much better in a wreck than a motorcycle.
Jeffrey: I have read similar discussions of that precise Bible story, and I like your thumbnail description of beneficence as "a favor which did not harm the favor performer in any way." It's an under-rated virtue; people prefer the drama of utterly selfless altruism -- but beneficence is liable to leave the person practicing it in better shape to do it again and again.
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