Try, try again…

We had an excellent coffee machine. I mean, a really nice, expensive one that could grind the coffee beans and make espresso. It was the kind that had digital presets for extra foam in your cappuccino, though we never made cappuccinos with it because the milk foam attachment was a pain to clean properly and I was the only one who bothered teaching myself how to clean it anyway.

You could hear all kinds of nerve-grating little sounds throughout that office. I could tell every time a person went to use the restroom whether or not they washed their hands afterwards, and I knew exactly who was being talked about in the assumed anonymity of the conference room.

The loudest and most grating of all those sounds, however, was the grinding of coffee beans through that machine.

Open workspaces are garbage, by the way. A hundred studies have disproven that they are helpful for the team and encourage collaboration. It’s really just a way for employers to cut costs by avoiding things like actual offices and individual desks. Easy for the boss to do, really, from the only properly enclosed office in the building. The rapid fire distractions were our problem, not his, and sure, of course it brought us closer together as colleagues when I had to listen to my desk mate take another call from her doctor’s office.