I’m Hispanic, and I work as an engineer at a university in Texas. There is a coffee pod machine in my laboratory office, paid for by my boss, the department head, but in the admin office, there is a kitchen with a bigger drip machine.

I notice that any time I walk by with an empty cup, multiple professors wrap up meetings and get whatever fresh brewed coffee I make.

One of the office admins (also Hispanic) calls me one day before lunch asking if I could brew coffee before one of the professor’s lunch meetings. Not exactly my job, but hey, simple task, and I get paid no matter what.

I am making the coffee, and the admin is washing cups to deliver to the conference room. 

As we are doing so, the white chemistry professor looks at us and blurts out:

Professor: “I’m sorry, it’s not how it looks! It’s just that this is an important meeting, and I don’t know how you make such great coffee here!” 

Me: “I’m an engineer; making coffee is the only chemistry I know.”

Professor: “I take that to mean you may actually know a bit about chemistry; coffee is more complex than wine.”

Admin: “Maybe he should show you his secret methods.”

Professor: “Are you sure? It’s a big secret!”

The next day, I start with:

Me: “Okay, first things first, I dump yesterday’s coffee and clean the pot with soap and water. If it is really gross, I run some vinegar through the water and then rinse.”

The professor looks shocked.

Professor: “Wait, are people not cleaning up after themselves? I definitely owe both of you a lunch.” 

I showed him the rest of how I measure and get the machine happy, like preheating a pot by running water through once before brewing.

Afterward, that professor sent out an email to the department requesting everyone clean the coffee machine after using it. People actually dumped the old coffee at the end of the day.

The admin and I got a good lunch, too.

I worked for a wireless ISP in 2001 that spent a ton of money with an outside marketing firm to “rebrand” our company and design a website for us. When they delivered the product, the first page that loaded was a 500k flash file that couldn’t be skipped.

When we asked about people on dial-up (lots in 2001), engineering was told:

Marketing: “That’s not our target market.”

Hmmm, were they trying to get customers to move from cable and DSL to a slower service that had a small mobile footprint? The entire engineering department just sat there and laughed. 

That was also the moment when I realized that people in Marketing have no idea about anything at all.

My Manager: “Next time, we’ll just shave an orangutan and call them a marketing executive. Then at least we could pay them in bananas.”

In about 2004 or so, when I was still in my first job out of college, the chemical plant where I worked hired an independent contractor to do some engineering work. We didn’t keep him around for long because he was totally useless. He was an older guy and really did not understand computers.

On one occasion, he asked me if it would be possible to get editable text from a scan of a paper document. I explained that, yes, OCR (Optical Character Recognition) exists, and I offered to help him. He gave me the document, and I scanned it and sent him the file by email.

Contractor: “Well, this is no good! This is just back to where I started!”

Me: “But I sent you the document electronically.”

Contractor: “I had that already! The printout I gave you was from one of my emails! This is useless!”

Me: “Okay… Just so we’re on the same page here, can you explain what you want to do?”

He explained.

Me: “Okay… So, the thing you are describing that you want to do is called ‘copy and paste’. Let me show you…”

When my dad was young, he had a neighbor who played his radio loudly all day, even when he wasn’t home or was gone on vacation. Every time he left the house and his radio was still on, my dad would go and trip the circuit breaker to his condo.

One day, he saw my dad, who was an electrical engineer, and asked him why his breaker kept tripping.

Neighbor: “Is it faulty wiring?”

Dad: “No, your radio is probably just putting too much strain on the circuit when left on all the time. You should try turning it down or off when you’re not home and see if that fixes it.”

The man tried it, and surprise, surprise, the circuit breaker stopped tripping! He was very thankful to my dad for helping him with that annoying electrical issue.

This is from many years ago when you got spammed with AOL CDs in the post. I’m sure all our friends across the pond got it worse, though!

Despite being an internal IT department for an engineering firm, we still got those things in the mail, and once you’ve got one coaster for your cup of tea, you don’t need any more, so we’d just bin them.

One day, a very irate woman from another department came striding in and ranting up a storm about how we were all breaking the law.

Coworker: “It is illegal to not install and use those AOL CDs here! How dare you block me from installing it? And how dare you throw them out?! That’s expensive software! You should all be fired!”

We tried pointing out that the firm HAD Internet access already and didn’t need anything else. Nope, she demanded that we let her install AOL and stop throwing out the disks.

Her parting shot was to break down in actual tears and yell about how she was going to have us all arrested for violating her freedoms. (This, by the way, is a rare sentence in the UK.)

A few months later, she was fired. Weirdly enough, when you scream at IT, we start taking a very close look at your computer. She was trying to access sites we’d blocked and repeatedly trying to install a dial-up client so she could look at very inappropriate-for-work stuff.

The legend of Miss Crybaby and the AOL CDs has been repeated in the IT department for twenty years now.