6am engineer

The coffee maker died this morning. Not sputtering, not weak – completely dead at 6am when I desperately needed caffeine before my anatomy review session. Jake was still asleep and I had exactly forty-five minutes before I needed to leave.

6am engineer

I don’t know what possessed me, but instead of panicking or settling for instant coffee, I grabbed Jake’s tiny screwdriver set from his desk drawer. Twenty minutes later I had the entire machine disassembled on the kitchen floor, parts organized on a dish towel like I actually knew what I was doing. Turns out a loose wire connection was the culprit – something I never would have thought to check if desperation hadn’t made me bold.

Victory tastes like perfectly brewed coffee at 6:30am.

The first sip of that perfectly brewed coffee felt like victory. Jake wandered into the kitchen just as I was cleaning up the last screws, looked at the reassembled machine, then at me, and said “Did you just fix that?” like I’d performed actual magic. Maybe I did. Sometimes you don’t discover what you’re capable of until you really need that first cup of coffee.