Monday, August 14, 2006

Big Cup Monday

A few years ago, our company became environmentally friendly, and started buying paper coffee cups instead of traditional styrofoam coffee cups. I'm sure they cost more than the styrofoam cups, too.  But they were too thin and burned your hands whenever you got a cup of coffee or any other hot liquid.  I'm glad that we don't have carpet in the halls at work - there would be coffee stains everywhere from where people would walk out of the lunchroom carrying a paper cup of coffee, only to have it burn their hands after they only took about ten steps and then end up spilling some of the coffee on the floor.  It was a bad scene. With talk of bacteria in the office place, people put up with burned hands and fingers and continued to use throwaway cups instead of risking their life by using a coffee mug that they keep on their desk.

We all got a big surprise this morning when went into the lunchroom. There on the counter by the coffee maker was stacks of big styrofoam cups.  Not the usual 6 or 8 ounce regular-sized coffee cups - these were 16 ounce cups.  Hallalujah.  We didn't get too excited at first - we thought that maybe our vendor brought us the wrong cups by mistake.  But then word came trickling through the ZCO grapevine that the cups were ordered for us.  What a great day this turned out to be! There was a steady stream of people going into the lunchroom all day long getting coffee or some other drink in the big styrofoam cups.  Even people that normally didn't drink coffee in the company-provided disposable cups drank coffee today in the big styrofoam cups. 

There is one down side to this, however.  When people are getting their coffee in the big cups today (and I am including myself in this observation) I noticed they were filling the cup about two-thirds of the way full.  So they (or should I say "we") were drinking more coffee than we normally would.  I heard one co-worker say that he had a major coffee buzz going on.  I just hope the big cups won't be keeping us awake at night.

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