By Jay Jamison
I recently bought a tea kettle. I was wandering through a store and there it was, beckoning me from the shelf. I had no latent desire to own a tea kettle, but in the typical American manner, I thought, “Why not?”
Incidentally, this is the hoped-for outcome behind store design and product placement that has made fortunes for many retailers. The tea kettle is a very attractive hemispherical stainless-steel beauty. It’s not a gadget, in the proper sense of the term since it is little more than a container for boiling water. Fill it with water, set it over the burner on the stove, and you can go about your business. When the water boils, it lets you know with a high-pitched whistle.
Most of my life, from high school on, I’ve been a coffee drinker. Unlike tea, coffee is a little more complicated. I’m old enough to remember percolators, the design of which incorporates knowledge of physics and the gas laws.
Filled with water, the pot has a central heating device in its base, that sends a column of boiling water bubbling up a shaft and then over a basket of coffee grounds, dripping the resulting finished coffee back into the pot. Some percolators sounded something like the gurgling of an iron lung while brewing. When the wheezing stopped, the coffee was ready.
Our modern world has advanced from primitive percolators to coffee makers, many of which have sophisticated electronics, including digital clocks and other marvels, so your coffee will be ready for you if you filled the basket with coffee grounds, added the water, and programed the gadget the night before. Unlike the simplicity of percolators, some of these coffeemakers are complicated, with numerous programmable options. For persons from the percolator age, programmable coffeemakers can be difficult to figure out. I never had to reset or re-program my percolator when there was a power outage, or a time change.
Time-saving devices like coffeemakers that come with lengthy instruction manuals, may not save much time. The time you seemingly save may be used up in other ways, like reading dull pages of instruction manuals, written by geeks with no social life, as you try to figure out all the options. Sometimes simplicity is not just a lack of options, instead it can be seen as a time-saving feature.
Many years ago, when the complicated coffeemaker craze was just getting going, I was given a new coffee maker. I was told it was the state of the art — a remark that usually fills me with alarm. I needn’t have worried, the coffee maker had only one switch with two settings: on and off. I was delighted that I didn’t have to seek out some 11-year-old to show me how it worked. My dignity and sense of self worth remained temporarily intact, but I knew sooner or later I would be confronted with a kitchen device that would cause needless frustration just learning its capabilities.
I now have a programmable coffeemaker. After some annoying fits and starts, I’m content with it, and hope that I won’t need another one anytime soon. And now, with my spur of the moment purchase of a tea kettle, my options horizon has expanded, with the added features that no instruction manual or programming is needed.
