The Bad Coffee

My brother thinks that the coffee served at a cafe I frequent is bad. Then he goes further, if the coffee is bad, the visit makes no sense. When he can make better coffee at home, why pay for an inferior one?

He does make excellent coffee and this is a perfectly logical position. It’s also missing the point entirely.

Locating one measurable variable in an experience and judge the whole on that. The coffee is bad, therefore the café is a fail. One particular dish in the restaurant is bad, so skip the place entirely. Hotel has slow WiFi, find another. One point of view, one verdict, and done.

The truth is that most experiences aren’t just doing one thing. Yet, we end up measuring them with just one.

When I sit at the café, I am not just there for the coffee. Sure, I do place the order and enjoy it, but what I am actually there is for something that is hard to explain to someone who hasn’t felt it. That particular quality of being somewhere that is neither home nor office. A room full of strangers who have no claims on you. The hum of other people’s lives as background noise. The ritual of arriving, settling, opening the laptop or a book, and somehow, almost immediately, being able to think.

The cafe is a third place for me. Maybe my brother doesn’t need a third place. He has his own arrangements. And because he doesn’t need it, he can’t quite see it. So he measures what he can measure. The coffee.

The people who know us best sometimes understand us the least in exactly this way. They see us clearly enough to have opinions, but the opinions land on the wrong thing. It’s not unkind. It’s just the limit of any view from the outside.

The coffee, for the record, is great.