Wessyngton Road & the Bermuda Triangle

A while back the old Mr. Coffee died. It was made of black plastic and we had had it for a long time. Tom got a recommendation from David for a an on-line place that sold coffeemakers, and so I looked at what they had and picked out a diecast stainless steel KitchenAid ProLine model that had gotten pretty good reviews. It also sounded like it was very substantially built and that is a desirable feature in our household. So even though it cost probably 10 times as much as its predecessor, it looked like it would be a good one and I ordered it.

The really big box came a few days later, and we unpacked it, and this coffeemaker was - well, it was very large. That's okay. So it didn't fit under the counter. It didn't need to fit under the counter. We put it all together and Tom made a pot of coffee. It was perfectly fine coffee. This was going to be okay.

But then the next time we put water in it, the "on" light came on, but then it switched off; after brief deliberation the machine had evaluated the situation, decided there was no water inside, and turned itself off. There was nothing we could do to convince it that we were not the kind of people who would try to make coffee without putting water in the coffeemaker (well, not very often anyway) so we eventually concluded it had a bad sensor and called the on-line place about a return. They told us we had to do that through KitchenAid, so we called them, and they sent us a new one. We packed up the old one in the box the new one came it and left it in the front room awaiting Federal Express pick-up.

The second one was just like the first one, large and heavy, with a glowing blue "on" light just like its predecessor. (There actually are three blue lights and two knobs across the top - there's the "on" indicator, a blue-illuminated digital clock/timer, and another light that indicated how long the coffee had been sitting there. Given our difficulty with actually making coffee up to this point, we possibly had not noticed this third light.) It also was just like the first one, in that after we ran one pot of water through it to clean it out it would shut off every time we turned it on.

We couldn't believe it. Was it our aura? Did we live in some kind of Bermuda Triangle for coffeemakers? Tom thought it might be a bad batch of microcontrollers. He called the on-line place we had purchased it from and said we were returning it and wanted our money back. We now had two extremely large, heavy diecast stainless steel virtually indestructible coffeemakers, neither of which actually made coffee. We were concerned at that point about having them both in the house; we thought they might reproduce.

So then we were at Caramba one evening, drinking Margaritas and discussing the competing theories (aura/Bermuda Triangle/bad batch) and Tom came up with a fourth one. The electrical conductivity of the water in Atlanta is extremely low. What if the water level sensor was somehow dependent on being able to send some electricity through the water? (The only city water with lower conductivity than Atlanta's is New York City. Of course, the only people in New York City with kitchens big enough for this coffeemaker probably have servants to make their coffee and have no idea if the coffeemaker works or not.) So when we got home, we put a pinch of salt in the water reservoir (it was full of water, since dumping it out into the sink was hard, given the weight of the thing) and turned it on. The blue light went on, and then it turned itself off. So much for that idea.

But the next morning, it did work, and it made a perfectly fine pot of coffee. It might be that the next time it didn't work, but the time after that it did, and it has every time since. For a while I was putting a few grains of salt in each pot of water, but I called KitchenAid to try to find out if this made any sense at all. The first time I called it was clear that discussions of the conductivity of water were not in the service person's script book and she really didn't want to talk to me. When I called the second time (FedEx had not yet shown up to pick up the first one) that person was more interested but still couldn't tell me if the conductivity of the water had anything to do with how the sensor worked.

So we still have the coffee maker. We named it/him WALL-E after the robot in the movie, to which it/he bears a certain resemblance. Every morning I get up and turn the knob to the right, and the blue light comes on and stays on, and he makes me a very nice pot of coffee.

This is all true. I could not make this up if I tried.