Gallery of the Uncommon

Desperate times call for desperate measures

We’ve already talked about the adventure of organising events. In the past few years, INESC TEC has organised and participated in dozens of events, and has been receiving visits almost every week.

We realised that the visits, which took place at INESC TEC's auditorium A, are constantly disturbed by people (not only by collaborators but also by people from the outside) who enter the building to drink coffee and to talk (out loud) next to the machine. The truth is that, sometimes, the voices of those who are outside drinking coffee are louder than the host inside the auditorium.

But since there is a panacea for all ills, one of the organisers of the last visit had a brilliant idea: to post a notice in the coffee machine saying “Out of Order”.

So, there we were still waiting for the visitors, who were late in showing up, when we noticed that a maintenance technician, who had already been near the coffee machine for 10 minutes, was racking his brain and trying to figure it out the failure of the machine.

Epilogue

Once again, there is a panacea for all ills and the author of the brilliant idea merely rushed to the machine, ripped the notice, smiled for the technician and the machine was immediately working. Unfortunately, when the technician left, the machine once again went “out of order” :)