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Confessions of a GTD junkie

January 19, 2011 in Tech, Views by admin | No comments

My background is music, my teens were spent in music lessons, music centre rehearsals, practising for gigs, listening to music, and my university studies were classical music.

My speciality is improvisation, and if you put me in front of a huge audience and gave me a grand piano and a song request of pretty much anything I could hum (especially something interesting like a jazz tune), I would confidently play the song without music, form my phrases correctly, play with the rhythms, and make a piece out of it. (A skill which is second nature to me, but seems to impress most non-musical people I know.) I am fearless when it comes to musical improvisation, and I know that small mistakes are sometimes what gives a piece character and spirit.

The same is not true of life.

Small mistakes – or forgotten thoughts – lead to lost sales, decreased efficiency, and generally adds to the feeling that there is something important that I haven’t thought of.

(A small example: having to go back to the supermarket because you bought all ingredients for an amazing recipe except the critical one.)

In reality the small mistakes don’t get in the way of my efficiency and rarely lead to lost sales.

It’s more that the fear of small mistakes, and I’m sure this is irrational, the fear of small mistakes is something that hovers over me like an impending huge mistake in itself, unless I have a mechanism to thwart it. Unless I have a tried and tested system.

GTD stands for “getting things done”, and the theory and tools are a very popular subject for discussion on websites such as lifehacker.org.

I have a strong suspicion that many people who place a little too much emphasis on searching for the perfect method of getting things done (rather than just… getting those things done!) have this same affliction.

To put it in a more positive light, I actually enjoy the process of recording tasks. It sounds ridiculous, but in the same way I get caught up with the intricate process of brewing my coffee, with the exact right brew ratios, water temperature, coffee age, pouring technique; I like to get a bit caught up in the process itself. Perhaps it’s because it gives me time to think about other things. Or perhaps it’s just how my brain is wired. I fought it for a while … futile.

By ‘caught up’ I mean that I sometimes stay up late reading the blogs of people who write various GTD (task list) applications, contributing to discussions, and the like.

I flip from one method to another. Windows application, iPhone application, application that syncs between Windows, iPhone, and ‘the cloud’, hosting own php task-list applications online, I even toyed with the “pen and paper” method, which is whereby you write a list on a bit of paper (or in a book) – magic I know.

(This didn’t work out for me as soon as I realised that I keep different writing books for different things, and that my Moleskine exists for me to brainstorm my life mid-week. It’s useful for drawing connections between notes, writing freestyle, and the like, but not appropriate for recording things in a running list whilst I am on a job, in bed, for good, in a searchable, archivable manner that you can come back to at any point.  Also I have this belief that paper should not be used for things that have to be properly recorded, due to their annoying habit of getting lost when you need them.)

I’m a GTD whore, and I often declare my allegiance to one application over another then change my mind.

I am currently using a sub-optimal solution on my iPhone that syncs with a cloud-based system that gives me access to my tasks on a laptop if I need. It’s extremely flexible, safe, and efficient, but sub-optimal for many reasons I won’t go into here.

I have compared tonnes of apps (for an idea of what I mean, see this list – I’ve looked in detail at every one of them myself, and spent many hours customising a number of them for my needs. Yes, I know. Not efficient).

I probably shouldn’t disclose here how many apps I have also purchased for this.

Confessions over.

Sync with cloud – Today ToDo

January 11, 2011 in Tech by admin | 1 comment

Please don’t read this post unless you are interested in the title. It will bore the socks off you!

With that out the way, here’s what I think about the subject.

First point. Resist ALL temptation to host own service. This will invariably lead to an enormous amount of dissatisfaction with the app itself as even the slightest outage will globally affect the perception of the entire application, potentially losing an enormous number of users, reputation, etc. User data is personal, business critical, and task lists are extremely important to the everyday running of users’ lives. Even if the service runs slow for 10 minutes in one year, it’s enough to put a large section of the user-base off investing their time in ever using the software again. Even if you have the infrastructure and personnel to provide high-reliability 24/7/365 coverage, with globally distributed failover servers, this will fail unless you are Google, Apple, or someone with a proven track record (Toodledo). It can never go well for you! At least if using a third party service, the blame can be transferred. Enough said.

Now for more observations:

  1. People like me are serious about using cloud services, recommending them to business associates, colleagues, managers, and cloud sync can go very well. For the same reason, it can go very badly.
  2. Even some of the high reliability services (Google, Apple, Amazon, Dropbox, etc.) do not have published statistics as to their *absolute* uptime limits. It’s simply not possible as it depends on too many variables (i.e. global politics). At least if you use one of these services, their reputation is large enough to cover any problem.
  3. On the matter of politics (sorry this is really boring), the most democratic way to run cloud sync service is to provide the software to anyone, open source, so they can either run their own private / personal clouds, or so small companies can start up providing free or paid services. This is less relevant to the argument, but it’s worth stating as the utopian ideal. The problem is that the liability for code vulnerability is shifted then to the developer… big pitfalls there!

Onto the issues of interoperability, usability, usefulness, and profit.

  1. We all know Google is King when it comes to providing reliability of service that is free, as well as reliable APIs. Problem is they have a history of changing their APIs (in the name of development) with little or no notice, meaning you may have to be quick-off-the-mark in providing updates. In reality this isn’t an issue, their service offerings have arguably settled down of late, with the exception of new offerings such as Wave.
  2. ToodleDo and other GTD/task-specific cloud-based services are a great way to reach new customers because you get a listing on their site. It would doubtless impress the majority of existing Today ToDo customers as well. I would judge ToodleDo to be the most reputable service provider, but they have their own business agenda which will impact on your users’ data. For example, unless you have a paid account, archived tasks are removed after 6 months. Therefore your users are forced to pay them a subscription charge in order to keep a perpetual log of what they have done. Many won’t care, and you could provide another way to back this up, but this would force users to remember not to forget to back up their stuff. For me this is a deal breaker. I don’t want to pay a subscription charge for keeping a task list, and I don’t want to have to make sure I back-up every 6 months. This will never happen; I’d rather use pen and paper.
  3. The options with Google as far as I know are to sync with their own task list implementation OR have a custom interface using e.g. Google docs or some kind of implementation whereby tasks are stored as emails / attachments. The task list implementation provides the best usability as it’s reasonably good and supports multiple lists. Access is also good, iGoogle, Chrome and Firefox extensions, and the like. The same is true of ToodleDo. (Though it’s not as good in this sense.)
  4. Dropbox or similar file-based cloud service is designed for storage of files, not custom access to their data. It could be a good way to export list summaries for printing, but then so is email. Unless you committed to providing other interfaces for users to get to their tasks on their computers using Dropbox or Skydrive you would be forced to implement some kind of flat file XML/text storage of items, and deal with the ensuing concurrency issues etc. Not nice.

Of course other services should get a look-in, like MobileMe, but they don’t really provide free options as far as I know. I don’t like the idea. As I said, I would rather use pen and paper.

My ideal solution would be for you to develop a personal PHP or ASP web server with HTTPS connection options, because anyone could host their own on a shared host for the same price as ToodleDo, but in reality this probably isn’t an option. (Is it?)

In summary I would say a clever use of Google tasks would be the most suitable and satisfying for the most users.

Why Clegg hasn’t betrayed us

November 12, 2010 in Views by admin | No comments

Many left-leaning liberals in the media are outraged at what they consider to be broken pledges on the part of Nick Clegg.

Johann Hari writes in the independent, “In just a few days after the election, he cleared a space in his swanky new ministerial offices and staged a bonfire of his principles”.

Aside from the fact this article is laced with hyperbole (look carefully – barely a paragraph without some emotive language!), I can’t help thinking this is exactly not what the country needs.

I don’t mean that in a patriotic sense; I believe this country will operate perfectly well even if we don’t get behind our leaders in support. Thankfully we live in a pluralist state, and it’s not important to me that my fellow citizens are either “for or against” a given government.

No, the reason I am concerned is because we are heading towards one of the most exciting changes in a political system, a genuine maturing of our politics, and one that requires we all start to grasp the concept of what it means to have plurality in government as well as amongst the electorate.

The maturing of our political system is something we Brits have long desired, culminating in our outrage at the expenses scandal – a scandal that would never have grown to such an issue had it not been for the fact that one political party was allowed to govern the country unilaterally for 13 whole years. It is precisely our FPTP (First Past The Post) voting system that polarises the parties in the first place, and splits the electorate in two – a split, incidentally, that has in the last 13 years seen one party as the goodies and one party as the baddies. It’s a well-known and well-studied fact – an obvious and intuitive one – that two-party politics leads to long-term instability (make law, unmake law, make law) rather than a slower more considered, longer-arching, iterative style of policy-making.

Yet what are we going to do about it? Is our appetite strong enough for a mature politics?

We Liberals love to decry the immaturity of rags like The Daily Mail and so on, but in my opinion there is a more subtle immaturity that many of us ignore; it’s a little bit more insipid, and a lot more damaging. But then, I have always thought the broadsheets are much like the tabloids sans boobs, and sans the quite-so-obvious indignant outrage.

When I read articles like Hari’s in the Independent, it worries me that we are more concerned about our leaders’ characters and personal pledges than we are about what they can do for politics itself.

Clegg, along with other Liberal Democrats, signed a pledge before the election. Before the coalition was formed, and before there was any possibility that he might be in a position to even govern. But this was a pledge of political policy, not of political principle.

And here is the basis of understanding a coalition. One must no longer think about pledges, promises, scandal and success, but instead one has to think of the hypothetical.

The hypothetical asks the question: “where would we be if  the Tories had gained power, without the Liberal Democrats to temper them?”

The hypothetical asks the question: “where would we be if Labour were still in power?”

The hypothetical asks the question: “where would we be if the Liberal Democrats had won the majority in the House of Commons?”

When you look honestly at the answers to those questions, it becomes very clear why Clegg has not betrayed us in the slightest.

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Roasting my own coffee beans

August 11, 2010 in Tech by admin | 1 comment

I used to be able to buy that Lavazza ground stuff (or Illy, or whatever), put it into a stovetop, and drink it with warm milk.

How things have changed. I now freshly grind my coffee (with a Baratza Vario coffee grinder) no more than 30 seconds in advance of the espresso extraction. It’s the only way to get that freshness and crispness I’m used to. I use a Rancilio Silvia to make my poison, and I can only buy my beans from Monmouth Coffee, where I know they have roasted them within at least the last few days.

The reason is that the beans deteriorate after about 10 days after roasting, in a way that is noticeable in the cup. I’m not a snob, I just have picky tastebuds. I can’t help that.

(It always amuses me, therefore, when people talk about the relative merit of one type of coffee over the other, in a supermarket. How any of it can be considered good is beyond me, when the stuff has been on a shelf for months. I guess it serves a purpose, but – yuk.)

The problem:

  • Freshly roasted beans – really fresh – are expensive in the first place
  • They are more expensive when you throw them away because they are no longer fresh and you didn’t get through them all quick enough
  • Getting freshly roasted beans (really fresh) is costly – postage from mail-order, a trip into central London
  • The beans are never there and fresh, when I want them.

A for-instance:

  • I buy 750g of beans because I made a special visit to Monmouth Coffee, use 125g, then because life is unpredictable I have to go away for 7 days then the remaining beans get thrown away (ack). Then I get back … to no beans (double ack). I have to wait at least a few days before I can get fresh stuff again (ack). During that time I have to visit cafés three times a day. Wow. A LOT of wasted beans, time, and money.

That’s 9 shades of annoying. And 4x ack.

I go away, I come home, I want fresh beans, right here, right now!

Cafés don’t have this problem. They get through so many beans each day they can afford a shipment every day. If they overorder / undersell one day, they can use rollover beans the next day, and reduce the order the following day. Beans always fresh. Not so chez Mat.

The solution:

Buy a home roaster. Store my own green beans for 6 months. Cheap! Fresh!

I have no desire to roast my own beans other than to get around the terrible feeling of coming home to no coffee.

Actually, that’s a lie. I love the thought of defining my own roasting profiles, choosing the type of roast according to my mood, experimenting.

So I am the proud new owner of a Behmor coffee roasting machine. None of this pokey air roasting rubbish. A proper drum roaster thank you. Complete with chaff and smoke management systems.

I’ll post back when I get some results from this thing!

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The closure of Becta

May 26, 2010 in Rant, Tech, Views by admin | No comments

The majority of people who are pleased at the closure of Becta are most likely so because they disagreed in some way or another with their leanings on various issues, for example their take on open source software in schools. These people can safely be ignored, along with those who decry “waste of taxpayer’s money!” when really they mean “it doesn’t benefit me, so I reserve the right to think it’s a waste of money”.

That said, Becta is really no different from any other government quango in the sense that you can argue for and against with the following argument:

  • centralised decision-making can bring efficiencies, savings, continuity to the education system vs. centralised efficiencies prohibit independent thought, local buying, and prevent the school from making its own decisions about systems.

I fall into the latter camp: as an independent, self-employed provider of IT services to schools I believe that schools are simply better-off governed on their own.

Yes, there’s a dearth of IT management talent in schools, and I’m already hearing people saying that many local authorities and schools simply don’t have the know-how to hire talent, manage their procurement, advise senior management on strategy, and otherwise fill that vacuum.

But I am making one prediction: we are soon to realise that there was only ever one reason for this dearth of IT talent in schools in the past: Becta itself.

When you centralise, you may be benefiting those schools who already lack this talent – especially those schools in special measures, under-performing schools, and smaller schools – but you are closing another door: the door that allows local business to get involved. The door that allows schools to make mistakes, learn from them, decide to hire better IT talent, and develop their own corporate character in the long term. And you are closing a door that prevents the individual  interests of a top-end school to flourish, form partnerships with local business, or share best practice themselves rather than send their staff on a course. As for the middle- and lower-end schools, centralisation can stifle growth by prohibiting the more modest developments they may need at the time.

Most critically, however, centralisation of this kind has an adverse effect on school’s desire to hire in-house talent.

And when schools don’t have good in-house IT talent, they don’t get good grades in ICT subjects. They may get big money for the use of ICT as a ‘facility’ but they don’t get known as a technologically advanced school.

The one thing I won’t be glad to see the back of is this pervasive view that dealing with local businesses can be a bit dodgy.

Quangos: like them or not, I believe they prohibit independent thought.

Disclaimer: the writer of this blog is not a Tory!

Hung Parliament, 5 days in

May 11, 2010 in Rant, Views by admin | No comments

So – you voted for a hung parliament!

Well, you may not have personally voted for such a thing, but you have to accept that the British people as a whole did so, and that’s what we have got.

Here’s what I am hearing from the British public right now:

  • “Don’t do it Nick!”
  • “Do it Nick!”
  • “The whole thing is a shambles!”
  • “Clegg is holding xyz to ransom!”
  • “The failing Labour government has no mandate to govern”

Electorate, pipe down! This is what happens in a hung parliament.

Nobody won the election. That means the party with more seats has no more mandate to govern than the party with fewer, at this point.

Our electoral system, whether we like it or not, has already accounted for this potential outcome. The process is clear, and it has been for decades.

Today on Radio 4 I heard one caller actually blame BBC for not educating people enough about the process. How dare!

If you don’t like this process, stop your impotent whinging and stand for election yourself. Or take to the streets in protest of our electoral system. Or write to an MP about the electoral system. In fact, why didn’t you do this a long time before the election? Stop spreading your bile on websites and radio phone-ins. It’s terribly un-British of you.

Nothing is unexpected. In fact, we pretty much knew it would be a hung parliament weeks before the election even took place.

What’s with all the hurrying, the cries of, “I’ll never vote Lib Dem again if…” or “Gordon doesn’t have the right to this or that”?

Rubbish!

I voted with my heart and my head, and I’ll always vote for my party as long as I can, because I believe in what they stand for.

This may just be the election where the leading politicians turn out to be far less fickle and outrageous than the voices of the public! Who would have thought?

The electorate has spoken. And now they should shut right up, and let the politicians get on with what they have to do. In their own time.

If you don’t like it, my guess is that you probably didn’t even vote with your head and/or heart in the first place.

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How I will vote

May 4, 2010 in Rant, Views by admin | No comments

This is a response to the excellent writings of Stephen Fry on the same subject. His is a long piece but well worth the read: http://www.stephenfry.com/2010/05/04/how-i-will-vote/

In the same way I know that writing this blog post (adapted from a message left on the blog of Stephen Fry) has no bearing on anyone’s views, indeed may not even be read by a single person, I believe that my vote this Thursday will have absolutely zero* effect on the outcome of this election.

It is, as one might say, eleven types of invisible. Four shades of pointless.

My vote is, however, a personal expression of great belief and passion in the democratic process. It is a cathartic exercise, one that gives me immense value as a human being and citizen of this country, and I shall cherish it dearly. I shall feel a warm feeling close to how I imagine a religious person might feel. I shall drink Champagne.

(For the above reason, especially at this decisive time for Britons, I believe tactical voting to be both useless and irrelevant.)

Regarding my vote. In this election, I have previously been wavering between voting Labour and Liberal Democrat, and shunning the Conservative party.

Brown attracts me not because of his long-term vision but because of his boring detail-driven policy making; the country needs this. I do not believe that Brown for one minute ‘got us into this mess’; one has to look a little further than our borders. I believe when he says that global problems require global solutions, and that the solution lies in the bigger picture of the direction of global trade rather than the smaller picture of the regulation of our own financial industry.

Clegg attracts me because he leads a party I have great idealogical respect for. I shall say no more at this point, other than the following words: Iraq, the Digital Economy Bill, ID cards, expensive centralised IT systems for the NHS.

Cameron repels me not because of his character per-se, but because of the unchallenged, ingrained nature of his beliefs and loyalties, which I feel will not adequately challenge the status quo.

Deep down I would love for a Conservative party that was led by a philosopher, a champion of human rights, and social idealist. Alas such a party leader does not exist.

Despite my past wavering, my gut, my heart, and my head tell me I must cast my vote for the Liberal Democrat party.

* This is of course not true. My point is that it may as well be, due to statistics.

People who look at car crashes

March 19, 2010 in Music, Rant, Views by admin | No comments

Why does a celeb, posthumously, become a superhero?

I could name a few – who had varying degrees of talent (from ‘zero’ to ‘some’) – who have been raised to this state.

This is not really related to the Radio 4 Feedback programme itself, more to a programme that was played out this week featuring Jeff Buckley singing Dido’s Lament.

I’ve never seen a car crash in realtime, in fact I have never so much as seen a person get killed or even die.

Nor am I one of those people who slows down to look at the crash on the motorway. I believe it’s more dangerous to do so, besides, slowing down can have a knock-on effect on hundreds of people’s lives by causing huge tailbacks; those in cars behind you may be missing their plane, missing a crucial interview for a job, trying to get to the other side of the country to see their dying grandmother. A police cleanup operation is made ten times more difficult by the behaviour of the public.

If you slow down to look, you are contributing to the chaos for one reason only: to satisfy your sick curiosity. I abhor everyone who looks at a car crash.

The only way to help is to look straight ahead and ignore it. Tell yourself people die every day from their own – or others’ – stupidity and thoughtlessness, or by mere chance.

Technically, I should feel similarly about how we humans are morbidly interested in the dead.

I understand our human obsession with venerating people to cultural superhero status just because they died in unfortunate circumstances; there is a correlation between the depth of tragedy and the amount that we consider them a genius. I understand our obsession with venerating stars to cultural superhero status because they committed suicide; they were oh so fragile, society didn’t listen to them, they were victims of the modern world.

But celebrities? People in the pop industry? People who appeared on Big Brother?

Jeff Buckley appears to have been a reasonably talented person, however he does not deserve the veneration to cult superhero status that he has received. Apart from anything, he butchered Dido’s Lament. Here is a beautiful piece of music written in the context of a work of opera, which has been singled-out by a man who appears to be nothing more than slightly interested in gothic things, with no more than a modicum of talent.

From my above views on people who slow down for car crashes, you might assume that I would curse loudly, switch off the radio, move on.

Except I had to listen. The more I listened, the more enraged I became. The more confused I became about why such terrible singing could be seen as so brilliant by so many people.

The positive comments that flowed in to R4′s Feedback confirm this.

Regardless of whether you consider this person to have been a musical talent or not, I believe that either way this kind of veneration is like slowing down to watch a car crash.

There are hundreds of other cars on the roads, millions of other personal stories, thousands of other performances of Purcell that will make you cry.

Is Buckley’s rendition of Dido’s Lament considered to have the depth of emotion that it does, because we only hear it with the knowledge of how he died?

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Browser Ballot

February 25, 2010 in Rant, Tech, Views by admin | 4 comments

Browser ballot. Ballot?

What, like an election? You mean, it’s more than a mere choice, it’s a personal statement of belief, a vote?

It appears that way. Each browser has its manifesto. A page held on a politically neutral website that outlines what the browser stands for.

What the hell?

Today I was doing some Windows updates on a client’s computer, and after I rebooted I saw something that led me to believe their machine had a trojan or spyware. For there was no branding, no explanation, just a box that popped up in an unfamiliar window saying that I had an important choice to make.

This has to be dodgy, right? A virus. Someone trying to steal my data.

The only important choice I have to make right now is what to have for dinner.

No, it’s the European Union ruling against Microsoft, telling them that they have to provide users with a choice of browser. A browser ballot. Yay! I get to vote!

It’s like returning home after your cleaner has been only to find someone took your wooden floor away, and left you a note saying you have an important choice to make. You need to choose what type of floor you would like to use from now on. Wait, you surely bought that floor along with the rest of the house? Like five years ago!

NO! Because a floor is distinctly different to a house. Lots of different people make floors! You should be given a choice! Otherwise it’s unfair on everyone who makes floors!

What the hell? Where is my floor? It’s my house, get out!

This only applies to Microsoft, mind. Your floor would only be temporarily removed if you bought a Microsoft house as your home, not an Apple one, or a Ubuntu one. Oh, and it only applies to Microsoft Homes purchased in the last 10 years. Oh, and it doesn’t apply to Microsoft Mansions (i.e. servers) or mobile homes of any sort (iPod, Windows Mobile). Only middle class homes. It’s because Microsoft are the Barratt Homes of computers. Their bigness makes them inherently bad.

Ok so the difficulty with this metaphor is that everyone in the world knows the difference between a floor and a house, but not everyone in the world knows the difference between a browser and an operating system. You, dear reader, are excused if you do not know the difference, deep down. It’s okay. You are quite normal.

Wait. Even worse to think. More people will vote in this arbitrary browser ballot in the UK than will vote in the general election. Many, many more people. That is so wrong it hurts.

Back on topic, let’s get this straight.

Anyone who actually knows what a browser is has already made their choice.

The remainder (75% of actual people – that is – living human beings with souls who just want to go on the internet without any hassles) do not care.

They will have a decision process forced upon them, be told the decision is important, (what, like abortion? Like looking for a new job?) and then be confounded with a load of options they don’t understand. If they click the window away, it will install a shortcut to the desktop, and come up again on next reboot.

I work in the field of IT Consultancy, and I can testify that to the majority of users, this decision is not as important as who to vote for on X Factor.

The consequence: IT Support will be picking up the pieces, after the sorry mess caused by a load of unsuspecting users who accidentally installed the wrong browser because they had no idea where to click, thus losing all of their settings, saved passwords, and not to mention being bloody confounded because the browser they chose didn’t have the latest version of Adobe Flash, etc.

Make it go away.

My mother doesn’t even know the difference between the address bar and a mouse. Give her a change of browser and she will have to go to night classes again just to learn how to do a Google search. Seriously.

Hell, even the BBC, in tech articles, regularly get operating system and browser confused. That’s how tech savvy we are: rightly or wrongly, our own media can’t even get it right. (Cringe.)

In the name of liberation, choice, freedom? It smacks of jealousy, of fanatical technocracy. It’s almost a religious war. Sure as anything isn’t politics. Or regulation for that matter.

The global tech industry requires solid, effective, and rational sector regulation. The EU has proven its worthlessness once again by entirely missing the point and unleashing its mindless red tape on an easy target. Path of least resistance. What a weak bunch.

It’s micro legislation, and it undermines the fact that the industry is suffering a dearth of real regulation, such as in cyber security, or in the environmental challenges.

Nit-picking at the big guy on a tiny point of interest does nobody any favours.

It’s straight bananas, except far worse.

It sure as anything wasn’t for anti-monopoly reasons because for one, browsers are not a major source of income for anyone (except those who only make browsers… cough cough) and secondly because this will do nothing to put a leash onto the fact Microsoft have cornered the corporate IT market – where the money is.

This is the techno-democracy-brigade equivalent of shouting fire in a crowded theatre.

I’m starting to feel sorry for large conglomerates (for the random outburst of legislation that clearly applies to nobody else) and feeling anger towards libertarian organisations who supposedly want the world to be a better place.

I’m starting to mutter under my breath words like political correctness gone MAD, and I sound like one of those awful Daily Mail readers.

What’s going on with the world?

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All because of coffee

February 23, 2010 in Rant by admin | 3 comments

Today I realised I may have a problem.

I was more than just a little frustrated. I feared the bad coffee served to me in the Beaconsfield branch of Costa Coffee (franchise name: Coffee Snobs) would actually ruin my day. Bad coffee and its effects have ruined my day before. I couldn’t let it do so again.

I am spending a whole day with a client. The work I do for them is important to me. I don’t stop for food or coffee during the day. This flat white has to last me until 4.30pm. It’s 9.30 now. That’s an abnormal amount of time without espresso.

You see, I have become so dependent on making myself a beautiful espresso or flat white that I expect the same when I buy one. And if I don’t get it, I become vile.

Here’s my home routine. 1-4 times daily. I pre-heat the espresso machine one hour before first coffee. I clean and test the group head each time I pull a double. I leave two espresso cups in a bowl of hot water for 3 minutes. I tear-off 4 sheets of kitchen roll and put them aside to dry the cups which are removed from the hot water at the very last second. I grind the beans within 15 seconds of the extraction process. During this 15 seconds I use digital measuring scales to dose 18.5 grams of ground beans into a double filter basket. I tamp with a force of 30 lbs, which I also measure. I throw away approximately 3 cups of espresso for every successful one I make on the basis that the coffee wasn’t the correct temperature, the extraction was 5 seconds too short (weak! eugh!), the fragrance wasn’t right. I always re-steam the milk if I discover that the bubbles in my microfoam are too large.

So why the hell should I pay for coffee that tastes like burnt milk?

This morning I had an ‘episode’ at Beaconsfield Costa Coffee.

More often than not, this place lives up to my expectation for a chain café. This expectation is admittedly low when it comes to quality and high when it comes to high-street availability, but my goodness it is better than the consistently awful burnt weak crap they serve you at Starbucks.

(Note to any Americans reading this: I believe it is a uniquely British phenomenon whereby the coffee sold in Starbucks is consistently offensive. My experience in USA branches of Starbucks is far more positive. The coffee in your Starbucks stores is certainly less than drinkable, but not offensive per se. I think this is something to do with the superimposition of Starbucks corporate values onto the lame work ethic of the British workforce. It results in failure.)

I digress; I have become that belligerent git who makes a scene in restaurants and cafés. I have become that man I always disliked. I am not even 30 yet.

Back in Beaconsfield Costa Coffee. The place is where I go to pick up a satisfactory coffee. Seriously, they get it right a lot of the time. On the most part, very pleasant staff, and talented ones too. It’s the only place I’ll go to out of London to drink half decent coffee.

Sadly this morning they gave me a barista whose incompetence matched only the curtness with which she dealt with me. Don’t get me wrong, I would far rather have a rude foreign barista who made a wicked coffee than a smiling friendly one who made a mediocre one. Fact is, I’ve noticed that friendly professionalism and competence go hand-in-hand. And the flip side is that grumpy baristas usually make a terrible coffee, too.

This particular barista has burnt my milk before. And before, I have politely asked for a replacement coffee without burnt milk. And before, I have felt like an inconvenience for drawing attention to this. Not this time.

I need good coffee. I’m not in central London at Monmouth. I’m not at Sacred Coffee. I’m not at Nude Espresso. This is the only place I can get it right now.

The barista makes my flat white but shoves the lid on before I even get to see the creation. I am in a rush, I grab the coffee and run back to my double-parked car.

I throw my coffee into the coffee holder. Coffee flies all over the car, and over myself. I am running a few minutes late for my client. I don’t like to be late.

Why did the coffee fly everywhere? I always do this with a flat white. The foam on the top sits between the coffee and the lid, it never spills. I open the lid to inspect. It’s like water. Where is the foam? Where is the creamy sweet microfoam? Where is the attempt at latte art? All I see is grey murky liquid, no foam.

I’m in two minds. I’m late, but very angry with the coffee all over me and my car (did I think to bring a tissue – no). Really? Is this sloppy crap going to be my only espresso until 4.30 or 5? Please no.

I run back into Costa and explain that this is not a flat white. This is a latte, with no foam. The curt barista explains it is a flat white.

Please don’t argue. The difference between a good barista and a bad one: a good one would be horrified at the thought their creation was not up to scratch.

I say politely “I’m sorry, the flat white has a microfoam on top with a very smooth but dense texture that prevents me from throwing coffee all over my car. This is not a flat white.”

I lose my cool, and simply place the coffee in front of the barista and say nothing, waiting for a response. (It’s very unlike me to behave in this way.)

To her credit, the barista says “I will try to make you another sir”. Curt but solution-focussed. The short girl who took the order, standing next to her, looks like I just insulted her family and called her mother a whore. Oh really? You are giving me the death stare because your colleague served me bad coffee? I just threw coffee down me and you are giving me evils? Really?

I wouldn’t even dare to serve this to my own house guests let alone serve it for money.

At this point I should explain that I don’t believe my intolerance to be borne out of a sense of innate privilege, nor do I believe myself to be spoilt, nor someone who takes things for granted in life.

It’s more that I have grown used to my own exacting standards for pulling an espresso, foaming milk (this is an art if done well), and more and more frequently I find myself expecting these standards to be exceeded when I drink out.

I take the new coffee and run. I get back to the car, remove the lid to inspect. The microfoam is at least there. There are large bubbles in the microfoam. The milk from my replacement coffee burns my tongue. I am angry. But I am late.

See – this is how I start my day. Angry, late, disappointed, and with a burnt tongue.

All because of coffee.

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