Business is picking up here at SyphiliticDonkeyRaping Systems. With cash flow coming in, management is mindful of the workers who stayed with the company through the lean times. They have decided to upgrade the lavatory and kitchen facilities.
We still have one toilet between three dozen coffee-addicted programmers (some of them with remarkably poor aim, but that’s beside the point. And some of them have a tendency to retire to the one and only toilet with a copy of FHM and devote themselves to the contemplation of Sarah Michell Gellar or Atomic Kitten for three-quarters of an hour. But that’s also beside the point.) Anyway. We have one toilet, but it now has a silvery glitter-effect seat. Zowie. The washroom sink has been replaced by a stylish green-glass hemisphere, like a giant salad bowl. Be still my trembling heart.
And there is a new kettle in the kitchen. I do not like the new kettle.
The old one was plastic, and you plugged it in and switched it on, and it boiled water, and you made coffee with it, and all was well with the world, or at least as well as can be expected when your daily life involves typing things like “this.messageDateTime = DateTime.Now;” all day. But the old kettle was not excitingly space-age enough for a go-ahead outfit like SyphiliticDonkeyRaping Systems, so out it went.
The new kettle is excitingly space-age. It is curvy, and highly chromed, and dazzlingly shiny. It is also a triumph of style over substance, and a pain in a certain part of the anatomy, and not the one you are expecting, oh no.
I don’t know if you’ve ever looked inside an electric kettle, dear reader. I suppose you probably have, we’re not talking state secrets here … You know how the heating element is coiled up in the bottom? Well, in our new excitingly space-age kettle, the heating element is not supinely coiled, it is proudly, nay, rampantly, erect in the middle of the kettle. This is no sluggish, lazy, flaccid heating element. It is a heating element that proclaims masculinity, dynamism, priapism.
It’s also a heating element that, for at least half its length, is sticking out of the water it’s supposed to heat. (That’s if you fill the kettle to the maximum permitted level - if you just want one cup of coffee, it’s a lot more than half). So … at least half the energy you put into the kettle, instead of boiling the water, is dissipated at once into the circumambient atmosphere. All righty then.
I might add that the element, over that part of its length that deigns to be in contact with mundane fluids such as water, has acquired a fair amount of limescale build-up. And that the filter is less than 100% efficient. So my coffee now has an interestingly gritty feel to it.
But this is not my main issue with the kettle. My main issue is that it’s highly chromed and dazzlingly shiny. This effect is produced by making the kettle, ironically, out of old-fashioned materials, i.e. it has a metal body. A highly heat-conductive metal body. As kettles have had for generation upon generation, you so rightly point out, dear reader (hello? You awake out there?). But yours truly got used to the old plastic kettle … So, the first time I used the new one, I picked it up by its (relatively cool) plastic handle, but the back of my hand came into contact with the dazzlingly shiny metal body, and that’s where the YEEEOOUCH! part comes in. It’s been a week, and I still have the scorch mark on the back of my left hand. (See? I told you it wasn’t the body part you were expecting.)
I don’t like the new kettle. It takes a lot of time to boil the water (hardly surprising, really), and it doesn’t filter out the limescale, and, well, the bloody thing burned me. Thankfully, I don’t think it will last. Oh, not because of the inefficiency … but because of the hard water. Drops of water get on the outside, and boil off as it heats up … and leave a limescale-y mark behind. If this happens often enough, the kettle won’t be dazzlingly shiny any more, so the Design department won’t love it any more. Style over substance. Again.
