We used to get free coffee, tea, pop, and bottled water at work. At the end of 2008, those luxuries were eradicated in the interest of cost savings and, it was asserted, in the interest of fairness as apparently our location was one of the only ones in the company with such perks. No big deal and if that means more engineers get to keep their jobs during a down economy, I am cool with it.
When that change was made, each of our mini-kitchen areas was equipped with a Flavia coffee machine, which charged 50 cents for a variety of coffees and hot chocolate.
One of the features on this thing is the ability to dispense steaming hot water for free and I took advantage of that, drastically cutting down on my coffee consumption in favor of green tea that I would bring in boxes of from home.
Recently, the menu option for the free hot water seems to have disappeared from the machine's user interface. Apparently these machines are highly configurable and someone decided to disable the free hot water choice. Sigh. I didn't realize that the economy was that tight. I guess every little penny helps to get to $13.4 billion of profit.
