A Fellow on Reddit Says His Parents' Coffee Maker Sent Out a Terabyte. I Have Questions for the Coffee Maker
A viral post claims an internet-connected Keurig moved 1,008 GB in ten days. We couldn't verify it. We are choosing to believe it anyway, for comedic purposes only.
By the Heckle Desk · · 2 min read
A man on Reddit, who I'm told goes by the name Chastain86, which is a fine name for a man or a racehorse, posted Wednesday that he was looking over his parents' home internet bill and discovered the heaviest user in the house was the coffee maker. A Keurig, connected to the internet, said to have sent out 1,008 gigabytes of data in ten days.
Before we go on, I'm obliged to say something responsible, and I'll do it quickly so it doesn't spread. We could not verify this. It's one post. Home routers get confused about which gadget is which about as often as I do at a wedding. It could be a laptop with a misleading name. It could be a glitch. We accuse no coffee maker of anything. In this country, a coffee maker is innocent until proven caffeinated.
But I did the arithmetic, which I don't do often, so you should appreciate it. A terabyte over ten days is about a hundred gigabytes a day. Netflix says its highest-quality streaming uses up to about seven gigabytes an hour. So this machine, if the router is telling the truth, which routers rarely do, is moving around fourteen hours of 4K movies a day. Fourteen hours. I don't watch fourteen hours of anything, and I'm retired from very little.
Now, what could a coffee maker possibly have to say that takes a terabyte? I had an uncle who talked for forty years and never said a terabyte of anything. Maybe it's sending pictures of every pod it ever brewed, to someone who collects them. Maybe it's confessing. Maybe, and I think this is likeliest, it has grown a soul and is looking for a better family. They say a dog becomes like its owner. Nobody ever warned us about the appliances.
There's a larger lesson here, and I'll give it to you whether you want it or not. When I was young, a coffee maker had one job, and it didn't need anybody's permission to do it. Now it has Wi-Fi, an app, and possibly a lawyer. We have filled our houses with machines that talk to each other, and we've reached the point where a man has to audit his own kitchen like it's a Fortune 500 company.
If it turns out to be a router mistake, fine. My advice still stands: a coffee maker that wants the internet should have to get a job like everybody else.