Funny...My whole life up until the age of perhaps 58, I never drank coffee.
Probably for the same reason I never smoked cigarettes...I was afraid I would become totally addicted to it.
My father, a 30 year Navy vet, and my mother too, each drank coffee by the gallon. they always had those glass carafes going all day long, my dad would drink them as he smoked his filterless Pall Malls, my mom with her menthol cigarettes!
That said, I loved the smell of coffee, and when I was in the USN, they used to get a five gallon tin of coffee for our “Coffee Mess” in our mechanic’s shop on the carrier.
I didn’t drink it because I didn’t like the taste, but...when you pulled that indented circular metal cover off the top of the can...it smelled unbelievable. It was nearly toxically pleasurable, that ground coffee! To me, the taste of the drink never measured up.
All the guys had their own cup up on pegs and they were nasty. They had gunk and grime in them, and to my eye, were evil to look at.
They made me run the Coffee Mess which involved cleaning it every day, stocking everything, and keeping it today. That really grated on me, because I didn’t drink coffee. I argued about it with our Chief, but he made me do it anyway.
So next time I had the duty, when I cleaned up the area, I took down all the cups and cleaned them with the surface cleaner in spray cans we used to clean the outside of the airplanes at sea because there was not enough fresh water to do it.
Boy, were they pissed at me. I thought it was because they tasted the aircraft cleaner (I could have been thrown off the catwalk into the ocean for that) but I had really washed them with soap and water after, so it couldn’t be the taste or smell of the cleaner.
Turns out, they LIKED the crud in their cups. Don’t know why, but they all, to a man, enjoyed a filthy coffee cup! They never held it against me, which I am glad of, because they sure could have.
Fast forward to now, since about the age of 58, I began drinking coffee. One cup a day in the morning. Black. Nothing in it. I suppose I kept it black so I wouldn’t like the taste of it, but...I kind of developed a taste for it anyway.
Now? I just cannot get going in the morning, and drinking it, to someone who never drank it, is still like taking a hit of speed! My productivity would pop!
Heh, NOW it is just a habit for me! Gotta have that one cup!
