Mmmm. This means war.

It started at my college newspaper, when I convinced the paper's adviser to let me buy coffee, sugar, creamer and coffee cups on his P-card. We'd make pot after pot when we were staying up late to write that feature story or column that was due two days before. Hopefully we'd remember to turn the maker off after 12 or so hours.

At my first job in Texas, I joined the ranks of old-timers who guzzled coffee throughout the day. We'd all take turns buying Folgers or something to keep the newsroom stocked. This worked well for the first year and a half I was there, and then the buyouts began. Bye bye, old-timers -- those men and women hovering around 60 who were walking ashtrays, sometime came to work drunk and would loudly detail their conspiracy theories about how their kids were trying to kill them. You know, journalists. With them gone, I was the only one who drank coffee, and I eventually just brought it from home.

Now in Alabama, making coffee in the newsroom can easily start a war. It's not that no one wants it; most actually do. It's about how you make it. The company provides the coffee, which is actually a pretty good arabica, and we put the individual packets in the filter of the industrial coffee maker, which has three plates. The maker brews a full pot, though, and some of us are smart enough to know that one packet of coffee is not enough for an entire pot. One packet makes coffee-flavored water, which I will sooner pour down the sink than down my throat. So some of us use two packets. This causes problems with those who prefer the blasphemous brew. "It tastes like something I should be drinking out of a tin cup by a campfire." No, it doesn't. It takes like strong coffee, which is really a redundancy because coffee, when it's really coffee, is always strong, but I digress. I actually brought in a coffee measure to see how much coffee was in each bag in relation to most coffeemaker's recommendation of 2 tablespoons of grounds per 6 fluid ounces of water (it's not listed on the packet). For a full pot on our machine, we actually need about a packet and a half, thus proving our point. The coffee the haters put in the maker at work is less than the coffee they would put in a maker at home. They know nothing.

The wars rage on, with each day Jay and I -- the deskers who spearhead the Get Coffee Right campaign -- asking each other if a pot of good coffee has been made, what color handle is the pot it's in, etc. We always have to ask because we don't want to mistakenly grab the sacrilegious fluid.

I don't care if it's a recession and we should be more conservative. I just can't sacrifice my values.