Some time ago, Microsoft began installing Starbucks coffee makers in the kitchens, and caffeine addicts waited anxiously for the machines to reach their building. Or at least that’s what happened on the main Redmond campus. But what about the satellite offices? I’m told that each satellite office qualified for an iCup machine when the number of employees at the office reached some magic value. One of my colleagues who works at the office in New York City told me that they eagerly awaited the arrival of the machine when they learned that they reached that threshold. The long-anticipated day arrived: The coffee machine was installed in the kitchen. And it exploded. Okay, it didn’t really explode. But the receptacle for holding the spent grounds overflowed and burst, spilling its guts out onto the kitchen floor. If you didn’t know what happened, you’d have thought it had exploded. The reason it exploded was that, although the New York office is rather small, it does have a very high number of visitors. As you can imagine, clients pay visits to the New York offices for meetings, presentations, all that stuff that clients visit offices for; but the underlying algorithm for determining how many coffee machines each office receives doesn’t take into account how many visitors each location receives.

Oh, and happy Guy Fawkes Day. Try not to blow up any coffee machines.