Including myself, there's a select number of people here that love espresso (unlinked: Ben, who doesn't have a blog yet). Coffee is okay, we drink it every day but for me personally I prefer straight espresso and the occasional macchiato. This isn't really a story about our epic afternoon espresso adventures, but more about our hardware.

We have a Krups' fancy dual caffeine selection maker thing. It's real cool: It has blinking lights, buttons, settings and cup warmer steam crap and excessive use of brushed aluminum glued on top of cheap plastic. But unfortunately, it's also the largest piece we've ever set eyes on. I'd like to think we're fairly tech-saavy people, but this thing has defeated us so many times I have grown to question my ability to negotiate the operations of simple machinery.

When Bobby first brought it in, we were so stoked! Aaron and I spent countless hours sitting there trying to make it do our bidding. We both have espresso makers at home, so it would make sense to assume we are pros and know what we're doing: wrong. No manuals for us--just do things that would make sense with other systems. After about an hour and a half of stupidly wondering why it wasn't working, it was deemed broken upon arrival, so we sent it back to Krups.

In their infinite apologies, they sent an awesomer, more brushed-aluminum-blinky-lights version than the first. The problem? Busted. Send it back a second time. It should be noted that when we send these back, we don't see them for weeks, or months and when we ask Krups about it, the typical response is, "Oh, we don't know what you're talking about. Our products are marvels of modern-day human engineering, but here's a new one anyway." So we get our third about a month and a half, maybe two months ago. First attempt with the third machine: FAIL! Same problems as before: Coffee machine incapable of generating coffee.

All this to say, we came back from lunch today to find the fourth iteration. As we all know the saying goes; fourth time is a charm--and it works very well so far. We just had a fantastic espresso time complimented with crackers and lame jokes. I can't wait to catch up on all of the PRPL Afternoon Espresso sessions we've been wrongly denied by Krups in the coming months.