Wednesday Extra: The Mystery is Dead. Long Live the Mystery.

One time about a year ago, I walked into the break room nearest to where I sit.  I went in to get some water.  We have these water dispenser things that claim to use some sort of reverse osmosis filtering mechanism.  I don't know what that means, but it says right on the dispenser "Filtered by Reverse Osmosis."

I remember something from science class about 35 years ago where the teacher guy took some sort of plastic bag filled with either water or a solution.  He then stuck it into a big tub of water that had either water or a solution in it and then some stuff from in the bag got out or something from outside got in.

I hope there wasn't a test on it.  Anyway, I'm pretty sure he used the word "osmosis" during this messy little demonstration.

So my thought on this water in the break room is that the machine it comes out of somehow does the opposite of what the teacher guy did.

Next to this magical water machine is the coffee machine.  I don't ever get the coffee.  Once was enough.  I bring a Thermos® of coffee from home now.

Anyway - on this particular morning about a year ago, I noticed that between the reverse osmosis filtered water machine and the coffee machine was a tall steaming, lipstick, stained cup of coffee.

It looked like this:

My first thought was, "I guess some old lady forgot to take her nasty-ass coffee with her."
Then I thought, "Well maybe she's tried the coffee before and left it here on purpose."
Then I thought, "Well, why even pour it into the cup then?"
Then I thought, "That lipstick is fucking disgusting."

I didn't think it was an abandoned cup, because as I mentioned, it was steaming hot.  It is possible that this coffee steams even when it's cool.  It's not very good coffee.  I don't know its behavior other than tasting horrible.

Well this went on for a couple of weeks.  Every day I would go in to get me some FRO (filtered by Reverse Osmosis) water to find this steaming hot lipstick cup of coffee.

Then for many months, I stopped going in there to get water in the morning.  This is related to bike commuting.  I will take my water bottle and drink it's contents (after my Thermos® full of coffee) in the morning.  Even though the tap water from home is nowhere near as tasty as the FRO water, it seems wasteful to just dump it.

But I drove to work this morning.  No Water bottle.  FRO, here I come.  But the Lipstick Coffee cup wasn't there.

I didn't expect it to be there.  I didn't give it a thought.  It's been a while, so I had forgotten about it.  While I was cleaning out my coffee cup (that I use for the water), a skinny old lady with bright red lips walked in.  She was carrying a tall Styrofoam™ cup.

Then the memory of the mysterious cup came back to me.  I looked to see that her cup was indeed lipstick stained.  She walked over to the coffee machine and filled the cup.

I was actually surprised at what happened next.  She put the cup on the counter and left the break room.

So I have an answer to my question, "Why is there often a lipstick stained Styrofoam™ cup of hot coffee left unattended in the break room?"

It's because some cat lady leaves it there.

But why ...

To be continued?