You think coffee is the “new” hot drink made popular and trendy in the 1990s?

Think again. Back in 1729 coffee houses were becoming the Starbucks of the 18th century Europe and everybody who was anybody was discovering the fad.

Johann Sebastian Bach was no different. He took the trend and built it into one of his most popular secular works.

The Coffee Contata concerns a coffee-drinking daughter and her disapproving father in a struggle over her caffeine habit. It’s actually a pretty funny little piece with all sorts of coffee references and lyrics like:

Mm! how sweet the coffee tastes,
more delicious than a thousand kisses,
mellower than muscatel wine.
Coffee, coffee I must have,
and if someone wishes to give me a treat,
ah, then pour me out some coffee!

The piece was originally performed, appropriately enough, in Zimmerman’s Coffee House in Leipzig.

You can listen to the music and read the lyrics or read more about the piece at the Good-Music-Guide or Wikipedia.

1 Comment » | Email Link

Today my wife asks me what I do all day at work.

When I was a kid I asked my father the same question once. He was an electrical engineer and he worked in an office all his life. He still does. At the time my father was not able to give me any sort of coherent answer about what he actually DID all day long. It frustrated the 8-year-old me to no end.

I look at my wife. I blink. I have no sensible answer for her. I have become my father. I finally say, “Well… nothing, really.”

And that’s the sad truth of my career now. I go to the office each day with the intention of getting “something” done for my company. But at the end of each day I really can’t say I’ve done anything meaningful or useful or even very interesting in the grand scheme of things. I am living in a Dilbert comic.

So what do I do all day?

I drink coffee. I go to meetings. I answer the phone. I drink more coffee. I write some email. I sometimes solve problems. More often than not I simply refer people to someone else who may be able to help. I drink even more coffee. I chat a lot on IM. I eat lunch. I talk about the other people in my office. I make a lot of witty comments. I go for a walk. I go to more meetings. I surf the web. I read magazines. I drink more coffee. And, thanks to the coffee, I pee…a lot.

True, I don’t always do things in that order, but you get the idea. When I was a child I used to play “office” with my siblings and we’d sit at desks and scribble on papers and staple things together and draw crazy inventions with crayons and generally spend a lot of time doing nothing. Thinking back on those days I realize that I was more productive then than I am now. At least I had some pretty pictures to hang on the refrigerator when I was done playing.

But the older I get, the less this actually bothers me. This is both disturbing and comforting to me at the same time. On the one hand I’m outraged at myself for not wanting to do better and achieve greater goals and change the world. But on the other hand I’m pretty much doing nothing and getting paid for it, so why should I complain?

It’s not a bad existence. It’s not a particularly great one, either. But I am beginning to understand how people just sort of “give up” at my company and don’t even bother trying to make things better. They have more important things to worry about. They have families. And the company is just a “hobby” that happens to pay them.

My father was a great dad. He worked his crappy office jobs so that he could do things with his family. He taught me thousands of things that are so much more important than how to work in an office. He sacrificed a lot of his dreams and opportunities to do things for his kids. I realize that now, twenty years after he did them.

The reason I bring all this up is… I’m going to be a father soon. And I have to wonder if I want to be the sort of father who can tell his child what he does all day. I’m not sure how important that is anymore. I suspect having a child will make me rexamine a lot of my values and thoughts about the world.

Luckily I have eight hours of free time every day to dedicate to it…

1 Comment » | Email Link

It’s income tax time again so that mean’s it’s time to have the passport handy and be ready to flee the country at a moment’s notice.

As a public service announcement (and a great way to work off 10 more hours of community service from my parole) I’m going to help you, the average American citizen, complete your taxes in a modern, efficient and even semi-legal manner.

Here’s the old way you used to fill out your income taxes every year:

You sit down on the evening of April 14th and you pull out the traditional tax form tools: two #2 pencils, a pencil sharpener, an extra eraser, a calculator, a ruler, a cup of coffee, a large carving knife, a fifth of Jack Daniels, a lighter, a carton of Marlboros, a gram of cocaine, and a loaded .45 automatic.

You sift through your various W-2’s and 1099’s and B-54’s, randomly scratching in numbers and banging on the calculator and sharpening the pencils with your knife until you get tired of the whole thing and call up Bernie, your smart-ass cousin who happens to work for H&R Block when he’s not drinking your beer and eating your chips and spilling both on your couch. Bernie comes over, drinks more of your beer and suspiciously fills out all your tax forms in 15 minutes, conveniently forgetting to sign his own name. Later that month the IRS Enforcement Agents kick in your door and and haul you off to tax prison while that schmuck Bernie visits your hot, young wife and tries to console her by taking off his shirt and suggesting they go “lie down” in the master bedroom.

While this method of doing your income taxes works, it can understandably be very stressful. The IRS understands this and wants to help by offering to come over and lie down in the master bedroom with your wife while you’re doing your taxes.

But the new way of doing taxes is much easier than the old way (especially on your wife). Rather than making taxes easier to complete, the IRS has decided to make them seem easier by forcing you use the one thing on this planet that is even more complex than the United States tax code: a computer.

Here’s the new way you’ll do your taxes:

You’ll sit down at your personal computer on April the 14th, play a couple games of solitaire just to “warm up”, put in your “Super-Duper Tax, Standard Edition” CD-ROM, double-click on the icon, choose a filename and path for the program, pick a directory location for your shortcut group, choose what sort of video and sound drivers your computers has, agree to some licensing thing which no one ever reads, wait while your computer loads the software, freezes half-way through, crashes your hard drive and bursts into pretty blue flames. You’ll panic and knock the computer on to the floor with your chair, only to have it set your drapes ablaze and spread the flames to your couch which will explode in a ball of fire due to all the dried beer stains.

As your house is burning down you’ll think about calling Bernie for help before you remember that he ran off with your wife while you were in prison last year. Don’t forget that the total destruction of your house means you’ll have to fill out IRS form 451 - Domicile Burnt To A Cinder which isn’t included on the “Super-Duper Tax, Standard Edition” CD-ROM. You’ll need to buy the “Premium” Edition for that.

Of course, if you had an Apple computer none of this would have ever happened because you wouldn’t have been able to find the tax software, or any software at all made later than 1998. But damn, it looks pretty it on your desk.

But don’t let me give you the impression that filing your income taxes on a computer is all bad.

First, computer tax programs notify you of changes in the tax law from year to year. For example, did you know that you are now required to send in a nude photo of yourself with your 1040 form? (No staples please!) I bet you also didn’t know that you can get cheap V1aggra from Cannada and that Your Account Is About to Be Disabledd. My computer told me this, so it must be true.

And using a computer is also a great way to hide any errors you may have made on your taxes. If you filled out your income taxes the old way and figured out that the IRS owed you 791 billion dollars, you’d figured that you made a mistake and you’d go back and try to correct it.

If, however, the computer tells you that the IRS owes you 791 billion dollars on your income taxes, you can happily send the form in, knowing that computers never, ever make mistakes. When those heavily armed special agents drive through your front window with their personal assault vehicle, you can just blame “that darn computer” for the goofy error and have a good laugh over it between the beatings.

Though, personally, I think you should blame Bernie.

1 Comment » | Email Link