Kettle Odyssey
Some people might know already, but last month I finally caved in and bought a gooseneck kettle to upgrade my coffee brewing setup (which consisted of a normal electric kettle used by pouring very carefully): it's this CHiATO flowPLAY. It's been a bit of an odyssey.
It took a while to arrive, mostly (I think) because it needed to be sent outside of the EU (just Swiss things), for which I also had to pay an additional fee I've been notified of by email just a couple of hours after placing my order. Alright.
What I did not notice, however, was that I put my address wrong. The house number was wrong. And I only discovered this when my package was delivered — successfully! — to the wrong house.
Imagine my face as I realize this. Imagine my face as I look at the number and discover it's the house right in front of my apartment complex, a private house so I can't just come and grab my package, I actually have to speak to someone. Maybe in German. I thought of doing so for a hot minute, then just asked if English was okay and yeah, it was okay enough to get that my package was left with the courier and the upstanding citizen in front of me figured it wasn't for him. Thank you, kind neighbour!
But my package was delivered successfully for everybody but me, so even if I was very fast in notifying the situation (thank you UPS for having zero humans in charge of the customer support, besides those who only speak French and German on the phone ❤1) my package remained in a weird limbo for at least a week. Thankfully the shop where I got it from took care of the situation and, after some back and forth and some waiting, today I got my package.
The kettle is nice. It also has a very nice jingle when turned on, and a variety of beeps when changing the temperature, all INCREDIBLY LOUD. Apparently there's a way to turn them off, but it requires pressing two buttons at the same time and waiting two seconds, something that's apparently impossible to do consistently on touchscreen devices2, and each time you get it wrong one of the two buttons activates and tells you so by beeping very loudly. I've tried various times during the day and I still haven't managed. I feel like this is some kind of King Arthur's ordeal and one day the chosen one will manage to turn off this damn thing, but until then I'll make my coffee at the tune of a very noisy BEEBEEBEEP.
In any case, the coffee I made turned out good. Can't wait to experiment some more.