As the times change, when Facebook replaces MySpace and friends twitter, g-chat and Skype each other over writing letters and sending postcards, I wonder whether these differing methods of communication actually help us to stay connected or keep us at a healthy distance.
Owning and operating a cafe has posed its technological challenges around staying organized and communicative with the right people at the right time. We have seen technological applications that have certainly helped our business grow and some that have actually decreased our efficiency or our ability to stay present.
I will be the first to admit that technology is one of my weaknesses. The way that some people have affinities for records or magazines or comic books or shoes and bags, I am addicted to gadgets. And I am usually one of the suckers that falls for first generation and newly released models, which typically aren’t the best of the best. What I like about technology aside from the novelty and the newness of it, is its potential to help make our lives easier or maybe offer us the ability to do more work with less effort so that we can be more engaged in things that we want to have draw our attention.
Here is a small example of technology that, in my opinion, has not brought us forward. Below, is a super automatic espresso machine that with the single push of a button, will grind, dose, and tamp the espresso. With a second push of a button, you can heat/steam the milk. To me, this is an example of losing the craft of making a beverage, a way in which technology has not helped better something, but actually eliminated the human element out of it. Ironically, the person is still standing there, they are just not doing anything now.
This Volkswagon green beauty is our espresso machine at Bloc, a custom painted LaMarzocco FB70. (We picked this color green to match our logo). This machine is considered a semi-automatic, but is actually pretty low-tech as far as espresso machines go. Not only did we save money by going lower-tech, the relative simplicity of this machine reduces the number of areas where things can go wrong. The mechanisms that control the group heads are not electrical, therefore, there is little possibility of non-functionality because of an electrical component.
Making an espresso based beverage is certainly a skill and something we appreciate as a craft. It takes lots of practice and training to perfect our practices and make great drinks. More importantly, though, this machine allows us to do something while keeping the human component very present in the process. Every aspect of preparing and making the drink requires careful observation and human attention.
I guess I am just reminding myself that it is important to consider how technology affects our experience of something that we already do. I suppose that’s why I still write letters over emailing certain friends….
On May 29th 1999, Parky and I gave birth to a two-ton baby, the spawn of our connection. Our offspring, or what I like to jokingly refer to as our giant love child, we affectionately named Diesel. She doesn’t like it when I call it our love child. Maybe that is what makes it funny. And from our love child came all of this. Four walls with lots of space in-between. Four walls virtually designed for intersection. Four walls containing countless connections and endless creations. Four walls inside which tell at least four million stories. And I only see the most minute fraction of it, but it’s interesting to think about it from that perspective. Although falling in love is often a very self-absorbed moment in time, it isn’t often that the absorption is realized in the tangible. Although it 
may seem as though the planets have stopped and that time is shinning down, typically affection, even that which is returned, doesn’t usually directly impact too many outside the immediate social circle. Just last week though, a person came up to me and told me the story of their two good friends that had just had a baby and went on to say that the couple had met at Diesel four years prior. I hear similar versions of that same story fairly often. It’s pretty cool to think about both the direct and indirect impact of a single intersection or what I like to refer to as the “Trickle-out theory”. I think about this even within the smallness of my own life and the inextricable people within it and how Diesel has facilitated a great many of those meetings. And then I multiply that outward and it gets so 
much bigger. I ponder all of the connections that were made possible indirectly through a meeting of chance, Mass Ave and Dunster, ten years earlier. Dumb luck or more, who really cares because I couldn’t feel any more thankful than I do and this is my story of love.”
landed her at that Harvard Square corner at the exact moment that I was frantically running by. We can forget it all because it is too big to think about. We can simply purge the thought of every detail, not only on that day, but on every day that came prior. One huge, way-too-elaborate, mathematical mindfuck. Each moment had to go just the way it did, from the precise instant that sperm greeted egg in order to facilitate the navigation of our collective gravitation. And it gets exponentially bigger because each detail matters in the lives that came first and brought us here. If my grandfather’s grade school teacher hadn’t decided to do the seating assignment in reverse alphabetical order that first day of his fourth grade year, who knows what other girl might have sat in front of him and taunted him 
with her mesmerizing braids of molasses. Without them I am nothing. And without their parents they are nothing and on an on backwards as far as we can conceive. Every last fucking moment exactly the same, otherwise, it’s all different. So, automatically, our story begins with more dumb luck than I can imagine, with an infinite (and by that I mean a totally countless) number of details dictating our intersection. But for the sake of space and sanity, let’s try to start the story where it faux-begins. Mass Ave and Dunster, we intersect.
needed the money more than her and that she hoped it would help him in his life. It was an early lesson in optimism, one of the few things I would grow to actually excel at, arguably to a fault. But really, my “sunny side” as it is often unaffectionately referred to, is largely beside the point. The point is more one of memory. If you think about it one way, every last second of every day is memorable, but virtually all of them are oddly and easily forgettable, or at least forgotten, or more generously, misplaced. And I was thinking about that I as I was retelling the story of my grandmother’s mugging. It wasn’t a particularly poignant circumstance. Even at the time I recall feeling as if it was just part of life and one of those things that just happens, at least that’s how it seemed, judging from 
my grandmother’s reaction. Yet here I stand, some twenty-eight years later retelling the story and I realize that it is one of the very few that has actually stuck around and not succumb to the near inevitable abyss of misplaced memories. In the moment it is near impossible to recognize the ones that someday you will choose to sew together to title your history. I guess in a way, I see this love story as one of those moments. A meeting of chance, that at the time seemed not distinctly different than any other coincidental point of greeting. And although the fast friendship and four-year love affair that followed were admittedly unique, it was still accompanied by a sense of misunderstanding of significance. It isn’t every day that you intersect with someone with which there is unquestionable 
connect, so this in and of itself should scream summersaults and jump off the page. Yet sometimes you need the benefit of time to reveal the picture, fuller. Sometimes it is impossible to glean the impact of a single detail until you are allowed the luxury of distance to understand the actual magnitude and how something so big can come out of something so very small. Without the improbable intersection, Mass Ave and Dunster, there would stand no Diesel at the corners of Elm and Chester. That much I’m sure of. And I don’t like to think about my life as the unending series of near-misses that it certainly is, but at a certain point it’s difficult not to. It’s difficult to imagine Diesel would have remained this massive mass of potential energy bouncing around, instead of the heap of kinetic that became, had I not hit snooze an extra time on that December morning. And that is not yet to mention the other half of my equation, my best friend, my business partner, my accomplice in crime, Parky. So integral, so entwined, so inextricable that I can’t imagine my hours without her.”
