An utterly trivial rant about the sugar dispensers at the Fresh City at 401 Park Drive, Boston MA

[bobquasit]

I approve of old-fashioned sugar dispensers.

Packets are a pain; unless you only use one or two teaspoons of sugar, they're tedious to use. Tearing open all those packets takes too long and leaves you with the empty packets to toss. Not to mention that the packets are bad from an environmental point of view! They're simply unnecessary packaging.

The Fresh City in the lobby of my building has classic metal-topped glass sugar dispensers next to the coffee dispensers. The problem is that they're not being maintained correctly.

First off, the little holes at the top are rarely cleaned. So they get encrusted with coffee-stained sugar, caused by splashback when people hold the dispenser too close to the cup. That decreases the size of the hole by half or more, reducing the normal flow of sweet, sweet sugar to a mere trickle and making the process of sweetening my life-giving coffee take much longer than it needs to.

The other problem is that when the workers there refill the dispensers, they don't bother to empty out the nuggets of hardened sugar which are inevitably left inside. Nor do they crush them with a spoon, or anything like that. So over the day, more and more of those clumps build up inside the dispenser. When you use the dispenser the clumps inevitably gravitate towards the hole, blocking the flow of sugar almost completely.

...

You know, it's kind of amazing that I can write about anything I want here - no matter how insanely trivial and stupid.

Comments

[oldwolf.livejournal.com]

When I was using sugar I would usually tear open 3 or 4 at the same time. But they don't have one with the little door on top???

[bobquasit.livejournal.com]

No, they have this kind:

[oldwolf.livejournal.com]

*shakes head* Oh... I though it had the multipl holes, like a parmesagn shaker. I'd just use a coffee stirrer to clean the hole.

[janewilliams20.livejournal.com]

"only use one or two teaspoons of sugar..." ONLY????

(carefully adds one sweetener to her coffee)

[bobquasit.livejournal.com]

Heh. I probably use more sugar in my coffee than anyone else in the world. In fact, I actually put the sugar in the cup first, then add the coffee - and instead of using one of those damned skinny stirrers, I use a plastic knife to stir it.

At a guess, I use about 1/4 - 1/3 cup of sugar for a large coffee. If I'm forced to use packets I probably use about 14-18 of them.

I'm not sure why I like my coffee so sweet. Maybe it's because my father used to make Turkish coffee ocassionally for us when I was young; that's extremely strong and bitter, and needs a lot of sugar.

On the other hand, I also grew up drinking Dunkin' Donuts coffee, and almost never needed to add sugar to it.