This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/Squatchdogdad on 2024-12-27 18:45:16+00:00.

I know, by the title you’re assuming I found something like spiders living in my coffee machine. I assure you, it was much worse.

I’m a daily coffee drinker. Not just daily, but all throughout the day. I wake up. I make a big pot of coffee. I drink two cups. I fill a thermos to bring to work and sip on all day. It’s my slow IV drip of caffeine that keeps me alive at work. We have coffee in our break room, but it’s always some sort of flavor like caramel chocolate. I don’t hate that stuff, but I prefer simple dark coffee that taste like the earth, so I make my own at home.

About two months ago my old coffee maker broke. It permanently switched to the “self clean” mode that fills the coffee maker with steam. Basically, it turned into a coffee scented humidifier. I still managed to use it for a few days, getting small cups of coffee and a very humid apartment, before a friend offered me his old coffee maker.

“It still works fine, I just upgraded to an espresso machine.”

When he brought it over he still had a full box of the filters. It was mostly clean, but still had a little water in it. The coffee pot had a lot of hard water stains on it, but that seemed normal. I washed the glass pot real well, filled it with warm water, and proceeded to brew a pot of just water. I figured running a pot of water through it would clear everything out before I brewed an actual pot of coffee.

The next day I started my usual morning routine. Make coffee. Drink coffee. Work. But this time my coffee tasted a little off and more earthy than normal. Did I forget to brush my teeth last night? I didn’t worry about it and continued with my busy morning routine.

The next few pots of coffee tasted the same, but I stopped noticing it as much. My taste buds must have been growing used to it.

Then a coworker came up to me and started talking in a really hushed voice. They warned me that my office smelled like weed, and that I should take my jacket or whatever smelled like that out to my car so I don’t get in trouble. I had a good laugh because I haven’t smoked pot since college, then started sniffing around. When I opened my thermos my coworker immediately identified it as the skunky smell. They made a joke that their old art teacher must have drank the same brand.

Later that night when I was laying in bed I couldn’t help but think about it more. Did my usual brand of coffee change flavor? Was I not washing my thermos out enough? Was my old broken coffee maker not brewing my coffee correctly? The mystery would have to wait until morning for me to figure out.

Then morning came, and I completely forgot about it. By this time I wasn’t even noticing a difference in the flavor. I had only been using the coffee maker for about a week and everything seemed to go back to normal, except for the strong dank smell. It became a little joke in the office that my coffee smelled like weed.

Eventually, the joke got around to HR, who then talked to me about it. The conversation was funny, and they knew I wasn’t doing drugs on the job, but told me the smell was distracting to other people in the office, and that the smell was worse than just pot. I’m usually sensitive to strong perfumes, air sprays, etc, so I was very understanding about it. I told them I would just drink break room coffee for now until I could go grocery shopping for a different brand of coffee.

The break room coffee wasn’t terrible, some sort of turtle dark chocolate blend. I put up with it the next two days - Thursday and Friday. I didn’t work of Saturday so I brewed my own coffee at home. The smell was horrible. It didn’t just smell like weed. It was more like a week old corpse that also happened to be smoking weed. I unplugged the coffee maker/undeath scent diffuser and put it on my back porch to get it out of the house. I couldn’t step inside without gagging, so I opened all my windows and took the dog for a long walk to let it air out.

About an hour later I got back home and could smell it from about a block away. As I approached my house I could hear some sort of tapping or knocking coming from my back porch. It was crows trying to break into the coffee maker. The lid was open and it was laying on it’s side, but the crows were trying to get in from the bottom. I put on a pair of gloves, scared the crows off, and picked up the coffee maker. There were little peck marks all over the bottom where the heating part is sealed.

For a second I thought about getting a screw driver so I could open it, but I wasn’t going to keep it after this, so I decided just to throw it on the pavement instead to break it open. I wish I would have just thrown it away. The coffee maker didn’t shatter in a satisfying way, but more broke into three large chunks held together by wire. As the coffee maker hit the ground it spilled it’s contents like some sort of terrible flesh filled piñata.

Some small rodent, most likely a mouse, had a litter of small pink babies and was storing food inside the bottom part of the coffee maker. When I made my first cup of coffee they were all killed, likely from boiling water. Over the next week they decomposed inside the coffee maker, slowly adding flavor to my coffee.