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Reply to "EFI conversion of my Spyder"

Ed, I salute you...Snoopy Salute

Having that coffee maker out in the shop just makes sense.

I didn't start out as a coffee/expresso snob, it just happened when I wasn't lookin'.  I was about 40 when I started with my final company.  They were losing money like water from a spring and a bunch of us (The 'Gang of Twelve') were recruited in to "turn the place around".  That took almost three years before we started making any serious money, then we never looked back.  I was in Engineering New Products and one way we realized to increase design productivity was to (over)caffeinate the Engineers, so we brought in some Bunn coffee machines for our three break stations and gave everyone free coffee.  IIRC, back then it was Folgers or Maxwell House for the Americans, and some Turkish blends for the Eastern Europeans (Mostly Israelis).  We all quickly realized that American coffee kind-of sucks so we started giving our Euro sales offices perks (see what I did there, Stan?)  like, "You bring in that big Bank customer who's on the fence and we'll give them a special tour through the (secret) Engineering labs - That'll impress them enough to buy our stuff".  

It worked, and in the mid 1990's our product line really took off and we were growing over 350% per year.  We were bringing in Engineers from all over the World and they all had their own coffee preferences; Brazilian, Colombian, Trinidadian, "Jamaican-Mon" Puerto Rican and, of course, a few from eastern Europe and Africa.  Trust me, ALL of it was better than Folgers/Maxwell House.

About that time, one of our sales ladies sold our product into both the largest bank and three different telephone companies in Italy, with help from a few Engineering tours.  Those deals, alone, guaranteed her lavish retirement.  To thank us, she sent over six Cimbali Cafe-size coffee/expresso machines.  These were the ones you see in high-end cafes.  Very pretty, lots of brass, copper and chrome but the real bonus was that they made, with the use of all those different beans being shipped in, fabulous coffee.  We were all drinking Turkish first thing in the morning, Yaucano from Puerto Rico at mid-morning (that stuff blows your socks right off as an expresso), Ethiopian with lunch, Brazilian mid-afternoon, Colombian with dinner (we worked pretty late) and then we all sat up all night thinking about work because we were so caffeinated that none of us could sleep.  IIRC, I was getting about 3 or 4 hours sleep per night back then from drinking 2 - 3 POTS of expressos per day.  I'm amazed I never had a heart attack.

I would get in around 06:30 and usually was the only one there except for Hannah Moreshet.  Hannah taught me how to really make expressos with those machines and was also a fabulous microcoder (person who writes the internal software of a computer) who wrote a lot of the error correction code in our flagship line of large-scale disk storage.  Suffice it to say that if you pull out a credit card anywhere in the free world, chances are that the data in your account is secure, somewhere in the information chain, because of her code.

So whomever got in first would make a couple of large mugs (we got used to quad-expressos after a while) and we'd share our cup and talk about Engineering stuff until more people arrived.  By that time we would be on our second quad-expresso and just carry on for the day, the expresso cup always at least half full and the machine a short walk away, where you might meet other engineers you could talk with about what's going on - MBWA, "Management by Wandering Around".

That was life at EMC in the 1990's.  We grew from losing money to having a $14 Billion sales year in 8 short years, over-caffeinated all the way, but wow....  

What a trip it was!

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