The Decaffeination of Mr. J

I’m finally going to confess publicly to something I did a decade ago.

I was living in San Diego, working in a sail loft. I had two bosses. One was fairly level headed, although when I first started the job, my impression was that he was a bit of a snothead. “Tell her to do this”, he would say to his partner, my other boss. He did that several times during my first few days, despite the fact that I could both see and hear him. Finally, being me, I said, ‘hey, what’s up? Are you allergic to girls? Are you scared of my fleas? Am I too lowly to be spoken to? Or is there some rule here that I wasn’t told about, where everything has to be translated through Mr. J?’

Turns out that he was just remarkably uncomfortable around new people.

Mr J, on the other hand, was not the least bit shy. He would talk to anyone, anywhere, any time. As the day wore on, Mr J’s caffeine levels would elevate as he consumed cup after cup of coffee. He would talk faster, becoming more animated and spastic with each refill. We all made comments about trying to reduce his caffeine intake.

But I actually did something about it.

Not long after I started, I was given a key and the alarm code, becoming the one who opened the loft in the mornings.

I chose to arrive early to open up for one reason, and one reason only.

So I could be the one who made the coffee. I hid a big can of decaf under my table, and slowly, over the course of three weeks, added a bit more decaf and less regular coffee each morning, until the only caffeine Mr J had roiling around in his bloodstream was what he came in with in the morning. The two pots of coffee he consumed at work were now 100% decaf.

The change was remarkable. Everyone, even regular visitors to the loft, noticed how much he had calmed down. He no longer followed people out of the shop with his mouth motoring at 600 mph, his arms rotating wildly like out of control propellers.

I told no one what I had done, simply continuing to keep the regular coffee jar filled with decaf. It was a small price to pay for the decreased maniacal activity of Mr. J. Although I was certain that eventually someone, especially the secretary, who was the one most likely to take petty cash to buy coffee for the loft, would notice that not one of them had bought any coffee in over a year, no one ever did.

About a week after the coffee decafalon was completed, the young kid who worked there was sitting on the steps, cup of coffee from the pot in hand, looking as though the night before had been hard on him. Staring woefully into his cup, he said, “I don’t know what it is, but this stuff just doesn’t seem to wake me up anymore.” It was all I could do not to break out in hysterical laughter.

I didn’t tell a soul.

Fast forward two years later, when it was time to give notice because I was moving back east. I knew that I couldn’t just leave things as they were, because the next time the coffee ran out, whoever bought it would buy regular, and Mr. J would probably die from the caffeine overdose.

I debated letting the secretary in on my deception, in the hopes that she could secretly continue the caffeine-free environment. But given her complete inability to keep anything to herself, I decided to start re-caffeinating Mr. J.

After spending a three week span of time reversing the process, he was back to two pots of regular coffee per day. And no one could understand why, after such a long period of calm, he was once again a blur of hyperactive motion.

I never told anyone what I had done. I just left. If they weren’t clever enough to think of doing that on their own, then they could just live with his caffeine wackiness, 45 hours, six days a week.