The Favorite Gift

Let me start by saying that today sucked. One of my journalism professors once said "the world is run by C students." Which is not to say that CEOs and power players all made Cs in school. He meant that if C is the average grade, then the majority of the population scored a C average throughout school. So when you are an A student (me,) and you do things like file unemployment (also me,) you are consistently annoyed by things like not being able to use your Mac computer to navigate the unemployment system. Or that your handwritten claim resulted in all of your forms being sent to the wrong address. Or that you cannot figure out how to use your government-issued debit card, but also cannot switch to direct deposit because of your reject Mac.

Anyway, as an homage to being broke, I thought I would share the Coffee-of-the-Month gift. Let me segue by saying that my boyfriend loves coffee. He calls it sweet nectar. He is not fun to be around before he has a cup in the morning. For his birthday last year I decided to get him a bunch of well-recommended coffees from around the country. As someone who drinks coffee with lots of milk and sugar substitute, I am not the best source for quality coffee. So I started by asking my friends and family for ideas. And apparently coffee drinkers are opinionated. By the time I had ten brands, I began to Google for coffee of the month gifts that included even a couple of those brands. But pre-existing gifts only exist within each particular coffee house.

So made it up. I chose twelve different coffees. I made a Powerpoint calendar with each coffee heading up a different month. I took it to Kinko's and I pretended I coudn't figure out how to print it. Kinko's printed the pages on cardstock and I cut them apart myself. I took an old CD jewel case, turned it inside out and placed the coffee slides in the lid so that it made a monthly desktop calendar. I apparently did not cut the pages well because they don't all fit in the lid. And I bought a new coffee grinder to go with it. How is this a cheap gift, you ask? The beauty of the do-it-yourself coffee of the month is that while the recipient gets wonderful coffees delivered to their door, you are only paying for each coffee each month. It's almost like a birthday layaway plan.

This present went over particularly well, and I think someone more tech-savvy than me (see "Kinko's," above,) should make this into a viable option for others to purchase online for their own caffeine-riddled loved ones. Not that any of us want those pesky C-students all hopped up on coffee, but everyone deserves something nice.