How To Not Kill Yourself While Brewing Coffee
Upon purchasing
your Sunbeam 12-Cup Coffeemaker (Model 6395) as I did earlier tonight,
be sure to treat yourself to the 14-page User Manual (available in both English
and convenient Spanish for the English-impaired). The manual doesn’t offer many surprises in its day-to-day
operation — from pouring water to spooning coffee grounds into a filter to
pressing the button labelled "on" ("encendido" for our Spanish-speaking
friends), brewing a pot of coffee with this appliance is a fairly rote and obvious affair. Setting
the digital clock may pose a higher degree of difficulty for some, but once
one gets past the learning curve of the "hour" and "minute"
buttons representing the hours and minutes one could press until the correct
time appears on the digital clock, it seldom gets more advanced.
No, the real joy of reading the User Manual is that almost the entirety of its 14-page length concerns itself with the vast number of ways in which
your coffeemaker is prepared to kill you. In this the authors are thorough and
exhaustive. In fact, the manual is confident that you probably already
know how to make coffee, and relegates the actual instructions to the back
of the manual as an afterthought. Instead, the reader is plunged face-first into a veritable A to Z of coffee-making
tragedy, starting with page one, "Important Safeguards".
Important
Safeguards
More
pedestrian manuals might sugarcoat their warning pages with assurances
like "may scald the skin of children…" or "if not careful, a
fire could possibly…". Not the grim Sunbeam 12-Cup Coffeemaker User Manual. Expect no coddling here. Sunbeam shatters your rosy coffee-making world right off the bat with a little wake-up call:
| When using electrical appliances, to reduce the risk of fire, electric shock and/or injury to persons, basic safety precautions should be followed. |
Note the
care Sunbeam takes not just to make it clear that its coffeemaker can and will set
the incautious coffee lover aflame, flood their bodies with electrical current
and batter them senseless— the Sunbeam manual goes one step further,
making it clear that every single appliance in your home is a potential
flame-spewing deathtrap for the thoughtless and irresponsible. Having offered
up this bleak outlook on morning beverage-making, Sunbeam wastes no time digging
into grisly specifics:
| 1.) Brewed coffee and grounds, both in the brew basket and decanter, are very hot. Handle with care to avoid scalding. 2.) Scalding may occure [sic] if the lid is removed during the brewing cycles. |
Coffee
grounds show their dark side here; they may look damp and gross, but if given
half a chance, they will scald you and laugh while they do it. Even an innocent
action like removing the lid of the coffeemaker will result in swift punishment.
| 3.) Do not touch hot surfaces. Use handles or knobs. Operate only with all lids in closed position. |
The first
sentence of this warning seems somewhat out of place with the rest of the page,
since it’s not really specific to brewing coffee with the Sunbeam 12-cup coffeemaker.
“Do not touch hot surfaces”? No matter where you are
and what you’re doing, that’s just good damn advice.
The trick, I suppose, lies in being able to identify which surfaces are the hot
ones. In my experience, this is where things can get tricky. Metal and bronze
surfaces left out in the sun all day are obvious targets (cars, bronze statues,
smelting pots, etc.). But as this warning seems to infer, hot surfaces potentially lurk
around any corner, and you ignore them at your peril.
I would not, of course, recommend that you live your life
in fear of touching things. Rather, if you have children, I suggest you
let them touch everything first. Plug the Sunbeam in and wait twenty minutes. Encourage them to play with it, and write down the parts of the coffeemaker
they can touch without alighting in flame.
| 4.) To protect against electrical shock, do not immerse cord, plug or machine in water or other liquids. |
Once again,
sound advice. If I could offer one complaint, it’s that in its effort to address
every contingency in which a coffee aficionado might meet an unsuspecting doom
while brewing up joe, the manual can get a bit exhausting. For instance, I cannot
imagine a scenario in which I would try to plug in my coffeemaker while submersed
underwater, as implied above. However, let’s assume for a second that I was
actually that motherfucking determined to make coffee — I
doubt a written caution would be enough to deter me, since a tidal wave crashing
into my kitchen clearly wasn’t.
| 5.) Close adult supervision is necessary when this appliance is used by or near children. |
If you have
a child who loves the taste of coffee, Sunbeam counsels that you watch with
scrutiny while they make it, presumably to avoid any accidents as a result of
their attempting to brew coffee underwater or while touching one of the appliance’s many ludicrously hot surfaces.
Of greater
importance here, though, is the fact that adult supervision is needed not just
when used by children, but near them — the upshot of this apparently
being that if your child wants to watch you brew coffee, Sunbeam recommends
that you’re present for this.
Perhaps
Sunbeam’s legal department should have played it safe, and simply advised that
children be kept out of the house at all times when the Sunbeam 12-Cup is in
use. Most likely several parents need to coffee-scald their children
from three rooms away, with the subsequent lawsuits resulting in a more blanket warning.
| 6.) Unplug from outlet when coffeemaker or clock are not in use. |
Unplugging
my coffeemaker when I’m not using it is good advice no matter where you come
from. However, my Sunbeam 12-Cup Coffeemaker comes equipped with a digital clock
that, by the very nature of how people use clocks (i.e. looking at them,
getting the time), tends to be in use at all times — meaning that Sunbeam
would rather I unplug my coffeemaker except when the clock is in use, which
is always. Perhaps they meant "in use" in a stricter sense, meaning
that any time I’m not specifically looking at my coffeemaker for the
time, it should be unplugged. In this scenario, I would simply have to plug
in the coffeemaker every time I needed the time, go find the time from a clock,
then simply program the digital coffeemaker clock to be completely up-to-scratch
with my daily appointments. That done, I would promptly unplug the coffeemaker
so as not to risk killing my children.
It’s unclear
which interpretation Sunbeam’s solid wall of attorney would rather I adopt.
In either case, though, Sunbeam’s warning makes it abundantly clear: they probably
pay their attorneys far, far too much.
| 7.) The use of accessory attachments not recommended for Sunbeam products may result in fire, electric shock or injury to persons. |
Finally
a warning that’s actually applicable to day-to-day life: advisory as to how
to properly modify your coffeemaker for maximum performance. According to Sunbeam,
you shouldn’t. But according to your heart, you’re already dead inside if
you don’t. Besides, if Sunbeam didn’t want you to put a gas pedal on your
coffeemaker, they should have explicitly stated it. It’s one of only four or
five things they haven’t explicitly stated in bolded type, really —
which is pretty much a green flag to outfit your coffeemaker with a deisel engine,
or I don’t know my legalese.
| 8.) Do not use outdoors. |
No explanation
is forthcoming here, leaving one to assume the shrinking violets at Sunbeam
are simply unwilling to vouch for their product in such an anything-goes environment
as the outdoors. This is a company, keep in mind, that provides its consumer
base with a 14-page bilingual manual to avoid obliterating itself by pouring
coffee grounds in a filter, adding water and pushing a button. Add in a nearby
forest as a factor and the manual would balloon out to 500 pages to account
for the various coffee-related owl attacks, bear maulings and lightning storms
you could later sue them for. So long as you’re in a hermetically sealed kitchen
with one counter, one coffeemaker, a sink and an outlet, however, Sunbeam is
confident you’ll probably only be able to kill yourself in roughly twelve different
ways.
| 9.) Do not let cord hang over the edge of a table or counter or touch any hot surface. |
I’ll be
honest: if you’ve bought a Sunbeam 12-Cup Coffeemaker and haven’t yet run screaming
from your kitchen in terror, you have balls made of titanium. That’s just the
sort of consumer Sunbeam’s after, friend. Enjoy each sip of your home-brewed
coffee as if it were your last — since, according to Sunbeam, that’s a
distinct probability.
Warning
#9 strikes me as little more than a combination of previous, much superior warnings.
I wouldn’t want to imply that Sunbeam’s User Manual is treading water by now,
of course — still, the main ingredients for disaster here appear to be
cord-pulling children, hot surfaces and scaldings. Old news, Sunbeam. You got
anything else we need to know before our kids brew us up a scalding pot of coffee,
or were you done? Pussies.
| 10.) Do not place appliance on or near a hot gas or electrical burner, or in a heated oven. |
I’d like
to think I’ve been pretty charitable so far with Sunbeam’s various attorney-sanctioned
safeguards. Having said that, if you’re stupid enough to think you can make
coffee by putting a coffeemaker on a gas outlet or in an oven, no user manual
on the planet is going to keep you alive past the weekend. It’s a miracle you
haven’t tried to cram your dog into the gas tank of your car yet or suffocated
after you put corndogs in your lungs. Coffee is beyond your grasp, and Sunbeam
shouldn’t feel obligated to cater their warnings to you. Confine your liquids
to room-temperature tap water and move your way up to tomato juice. Only then,
when you’ve worked your way through several "primer" drinks, will
you have the experience and confidence to brew up a pot of oven-fresh coffee.
| 11.) Do not use appliance for other than intended use. |
I suspect
we’re at the end of the real warnings here, as Sunbeam seems to be talking exclusively
to the sub-normals now. If you’ve ever been at a lecture, you’ll remember that
all the good questions usually get asked first, and people eventually start
asking the speaker just about anything to pad out the hour. This seems a lot
like that. "Okay, so that’s all the major stuff out of the way. How much
time we got left there? Ooooo. Fifteen minutes? Okay, uh… oh! I should also
mention that the Sunbeam 12-Cup Coffeemaker should not be used as a suppository.
Also, do not apply Sunbeam 12-Cup Coffeemaker directly to face. Uh. Explosives
and nerve toxins should be kept separate from the coffeemaker’s water reservoir
at all times."
| 12.) Use on a hard, flat level surface only, to avoid interruption of air flow underneath the appliance. |
I wasn’t
aware that coffeemakers needed air flow. I sort of assumed grounds + water
+ hot = coffee, which just goes to show you that Sunbeam’s list of safeguards
has a little something to teach everyone.
I hadn’t
been planning on using my coffeemaker on non-flat surfaces (hills, fjords and
the like), but I admit I’m curious as to how putting a flat-bottomed appliance
on a flat surface could possibly improve airflow underneath it.
Special
Cord Set Instructions
With all
the ways in which their product intends to destroy you out of the way, the Sunbeam
User Manual finally gets down to the nuts and bolts of its product: namely the
power cord, and why it’s so short:
| Specal Cord Set Instructions A short supply power cord is provided to reduce the hazards resulting from becoming entangled in or tripping over a longer cord. |
This was easily my favorite
part of the entire manual, since it’s such a brazen, obvious lie. Sunbeam made their cords short because a short cord takes less material to
manufacture than a long one, and Sunbeam saves money. The first time I tried
to plug my coffeemaker in, I thought there’d been a design error, as the cord
in the back extended barely eight inches and resembled less a conduit of electricity
then a vestigial tail. When I finally got to this section of the User Manual
and read that this cumbersome and irritating feature was designed into the coffeemaker
on purpose, I had to laugh at Sunbeam’s balls. It’s one thing to give your customer
a cord the length of a child’s running shoe with which to extend to an outlet, forcing you to rearrange your entire kitchen to accomodate it; it’s
another entirely to suggest that by denying you a further helpful few inches
of cord to play with, they’re in fact snatching you from the very jaws of death.
"Tripping
over a longer cord"? Who makes coffee on the floor? How much cord
was in the original design that there was enough surplus cascading around the
kitchen to trip someone? With its current design of about 6-8 inches of cord,
is Sunbeam infering that adding another 8 inches to help you reach an outlet
on your counter would entangle you? Is it possible to get entangled in a foot-and-a-half
of cord?
The answer, of course, is
no; never in a million years. So you really have to salute Sunbeam for a design
choice made specifically to improve profitability and inconvenience their customers,
passed off to you, the apparent clumsy idiot, as their helpful way of preventing
you from strangling yourself with a foot of cord on a kitchen counter.
Assholes.
You Made
It!
| Congratulations! You are the owner of a SUNBEAM Coffeemaker. |
Don’t worry
about that strange new feeling coursing through you; that’s simply pride you’re
feeling from buying the Sunbeam 12-Cup Coffeemaker. Oh sure, you could have
gone with the six-cup. But last time you checked, you weren’t a huge pussy.
Anyone who says the Sunbeam 12-Cup is too much coffeemaker for you to handle
is talking smack and needs a slap in a certain part of their face: the mouth
part.
Happy brewing!
Watch out for that six inches of cord now!