Today marked the end of a harrowing, ongoing struggle in my life. I'm not sure when it began exactly. I suppose it began about two months ago.

My coffee machine began producing terrible tasting coffee. It was an intermittent problem, so it took me a while to realize that the coffee was actually bad. I would just get up in the morning, make a cup of coffee, drink it, and think `Gee, I guess I don't like coffee as much as I thought. It tastes gross.'. Eventually, I had a decent amount of sleep before encountering another bad cup, so I had the presence of mind to realize that it wasn't me, it was the coffee. It tasted really, really nasty. It tasted like it was moldy or rotten or something. I supposed that my coffee machine was dirty inside, so I took it apart as much as I could and carefully wiped down all the internal surfaces that I had access to. After putting it together, I ran a pot of water through it to rinse it out. Sure enough, the next cup tasted fine. After a while, however, yet another bad batch came out, just as horrible as ever! I cleaned it again, it seemed ok again, and this cycle continued.

Every time I thought I had finally cleaned all traces of nastiness from my coffee machine and it shocked me several days later with another putrid cup, the feelings of fear, uncertainty, and doubt surrounding the machine grew. It seemed like my cleaning efforts didn't have any effect, and it produced nice or horrible coffee according to its own whims. I began to dread waking up and activating the machine, not knowing what sort of coffee it would subject me to that day.

After the machine produced bad coffee on several days in a row, reason returned to me, and I hypothesized that it might be malfunctioning in some way. After poring over its manual, I noticed something that had previously escaped my attention: coffee machines periodically need to be `descaled'. In order to descale a coffee machine, you need coffee machine descaler. Apparently, this is not a common item, because I couldn't find it in any store near my apartment. One day, I finally hopped on a bus and made a trek out to Walmart, where I bought some coffee machine descaler. At this point, I was beginning to feel like I was in control of the situation. Clearly, I had found the problem, since I had never descaled the thing. I had the descaler right there. There was nothing that machine could do to stop me from descaling it.

I descaled it three times in a row, and then ran several pots of water through it to give it a good rinsing. The next morning, I felt so confident in my solution that I was actually looking forward to activating the machine. Of course, the coffee tasted fine. There was no trace of anything unpleasant in it. The machine continued to make nice coffee for about a week.

I had almost forgotten about the whole matter when it nailed me again. This time, the coffee was worse than ever. It was unbelievably putrid. It tasted as if something had died in it. After throwing out the disgusting coffee, I helplessly went on with my day. Throughout the day, I alternately felt that the coffee machine had little wretched animals inside it, that the coffee machine was conspiring with other appliances, or that the coffee machine was under the control of some evil supernatural being.

Today, I woke up, and was face-to-face with the machine once again. But today I didn't feel helpless or frustrated. I didn't clean it. I didn't descale it. I picked it up, unplugged it, put it in a box in the corner, made a mental note to never take it out, and then went and bought a jar of instant coffee. I made a cup of instant coffee, and it tasted great. It tasted like freedom.