The Drink Cooler
Here at my place of employment, we have a cooler containing cold softdrinks and bottled juices, free to staff. It's a beautiful thing. One of the few perks of working where I work. They pay me dirt and torture me relentlessly, but I can have a Coke.

I'm pretty sure at least something in this place will kill me before I'm able to escape. It could be the drink cooler. This cooler is likely the oldest known electric cooler still functioning on the planet. Somehow, it keeps running. But it looks like it shouldn't work and should have been put out of its misery long ago. In all honesty, it's probably made of some sort of toxic materials, now illegal to use in the manufacture of consumer goods since the cooler was made in the early 17th century. At one point a hole appeared in the underneath side of the lid, so every time you closed the lid this crumbly rusty looking powdery stuff would fall out of the hole and onto the lids of the drinks. The hole stayed open for a few days, forcing us to deal with the strange potentially hazardous substance. I finally took matters into my own hands and fixed it. With tape. Tape will surely protect us from any biohazardous material or chemical toxin. Right?

Now, I'm not sure what they did around here until I started working here a year or so ago. But without me, this cooler would be a constant disaster area. It's the source of endless frustration for me. The one shining good thing I look forward to here everyday is a nice, cold Coke for lunch. My one daily caffeine allowance. The one redeemable quality of working here. Free Coke. So imagine my disappointment on the days when I find no Coke in the cooler. How hard is it to keep a cooler stocked?

The drinks are delivered to the room containing the cooler. However, they do not jump into the cooler on their own. Someone must physically place the drinks inside the cooler. Hence the cooling process begins. Maybe we need to hire a Cooler Coordinator to make sure the cooler is properly stocked at all times. Because if I never went down there to attend to the cooler, we'd have a room full of warm drinks, and a cooler full of very cool air.

Occassionally people will decide they need to help a bit with the cooler. I don't know who these people are for sure, but I can guess, based on the flavors of drinks they decide to add to the cooler. These people do not understand proper cooler loading techniques. They'll look for whatever drink they prefer, and if they don't see at the top of the cooler, they'll throw in a 6-pack of it on top of everything else. While this is essentially the drink cooler loading process, it is entirely the wrong way to load a cooler for effective and practical drink cooling, selection, and retrieval.

I spent three summers in highschool and college working for a golf course in the food and beverage department. During my time there I learned the proper ways to load a cooler for easy location and distribution of drinks upon demand. There is a technique to it that allows for a wide variety of drinks to be clearly on display in a cooler, evenly cooled throughout the cooler, and easily reachable for serving. I became an expert. However, even without my extensive training in this area, common sense should allow anyone knowledge of proper cooler operation.

It's simple. First, you never load the entire 6-pack still in the plastic rings. You take the cans out of the rings. If you place 6-pack on top of 6-pack the 6-packs on the bottom become unreachable, and therefore unavailable, wasting space. Soon the rings and cans get all tangled together, and you have a huge mess inside the cooler. Second, you load from bottom to top, in columns, per drink type. This allows some of every drink to be at the top. When one column is low, you load more of that particular softdrink. Third, load the volume of each type of drink per the demand. Take notice as to the most popular drinks, and keep a good supply of those drinks in the cooler. There is never a need for 36 cans of Big Red or Sunkist or generic 'root beer'. That takes space away from the drinks people like, such as Coke, Diet Coke, Dr. Pepper, and Diet Dr. Pepper. The Big Red, Sunkist, 'root beer' freaks don't need that much space in the cooler.

What is hard about that? I'll go in a couple times a week and load the cooler properly, to the top. It's a fabulous example of impeccable cooler maintenance. But without fail, I'll come along in a day or two and the Diet Dr. Pepper lover has thrown in two 6-packs of Diet DP on top of my beautiful arrangement of softdrinks. Then someone else will come along, unable to find their Big Red because of all the Diet DP on top, and he'll throw in two 6-packs of Big Red. This ruins the whole thing! Drinks running amok.

All I want is one cold Coke for lunch. And a tidy cooler. That is not too much to ask, people.

C.T.