a silly story about a kettle
I start every day by making pour-over coffee. It’s a little ritual—only takes five minutes—but it’s grounding, keeps me sane. Entering the workforce during the era of WFH meant rolling out of bed and immediately logging on. There was no commute to usher in a bustling day, no distinct switch between rest and work.
Making coffee in the morning became a model commute in my head. Similar to a commute, most of the steps are as simple as muscle memory. Heat the kettle, tare the scale, measure the beans, bloom the coffee, etc., etc. But actually brewing coffee requires one’s full attention. Angling the hand, positioning your height and distance, adjusting the speed of the flow, maintaining tight circular pours, tracking the ratio of water to coffee, monitoring the timer. I’ve done this at home in the exact same fashion probably more than 500 times at this point; that’s over 40 hours of brewing coffee.
When I started working in an office daily last fall, I requested coffee equipment so I could bring my morning routine into the office. My team was kind enough to oblige. It wasn’t exactly the same setup as my own at home, a Chemex instead of a Kalita Wave, grounds instead of beans and a grinder—all very trivial differences.
The kettle is also different. Not even perceivably dissimilar, just an alternative brand. But that kettle fucked me up, like I developed an actual animosity toward the kettle. Its heating mechanism is different, the handle is shaped differently, the spout is angled and cut differently. And to be fair, I have no idea how any of this affects the physics or quality of a kettle, I just couldn’t stand how it felt so unfamiliar. I didn’t know how to angle my hand, what height or distance from the Chemex to pour from, I’d splash boiling water onto my skin, accidentally overfill the filter, etc. I no longer even wanted to make coffee; it became a practice out of necessity. I started to zone out while brewing in order to forget about the entire awkward experience.
Earlier this week though, while using this godforsaken kettle, I suddenly realized that it didn’t feel awkward anymore. I was not burning myself by accident. My hand instinctively knew how to grasp the kettle’s handle, how to angle itself, where to pour from. I don’t know when it happened, but it had all become familiar to me. It was a very brief instant, but it was also very charming.
I remembered how there are some things that only become familiar with time like becoming better at your job or developing taste, how I had been working in this office for six months already after a weird vacuum of time that felt like it would never end, how the most insignificant moments can bring the most grounding learnings like my daily encounter with this annoying, little kettle.
You just need to be open to noticing them.