Appeared in The Cynic Online Magazine
Welcome to Coffee Klatch, the mobile app that puts the smell of brewing coffee right into your car without the hazards of driving around with a hot bubbling cup in your hand.
Once you have synced Coffee Klatch to your Smartphone, you can experience the smell of French Roast or Sumatra or any other of our thirty different coffee blends and even talk to fellow Coffee Klatch members in a total of five cars driving near you. Only $49.99. Think of the money you’ll save and the reduced number of plastic cups in landfills.
Steps to the syncing process: (1) Click on the Coffee Klatch App, a small icon of a coffee pot. The app will open, and now you must (2) Click on Brew. (3) Select a password. This should contain at least eight letters and fourteen numbers, and be sure to memorize it. Coffee Klatch will rate your password Boiling Over, Hot, Tepid, or Cold depending on its strength to keep people from smelling your coffee. Once your password has been accepted, you must (4) Select your Setting Options by pressing Brew Strength, Strong or Regular, Delay Brew, Brew Now, Select/Off.
(5) Would you like the smell of a Quad Shot Vanilla Latté or a Venti Caramel Machiatto? Scroll through our list and select up to ten. Be sure (6) to choose Default should you wish Americano. Now (7) press Infuse, and virtual liquid will start to bubble in the bottom of the little pot. Soon you will hear a short, appealing bell. (8) Press Drink, and you immediately smell fresh brewed coffee in your car.
Coffee Klatch may only be synced when your car is moving no faster than 3 miles per hour. Our app knows your speed and location, so it may stop syncing at any time if you exceed this speed. Congratulations to residents of Los Angeles, Houston, Chicago, and Phoenix – you have the worst highway bottlenecks in the United States – average speed 2.876 mph. You’re in the ideal place to sync Coffee Klatch.
Let’s say you attempt to traverse the East Los Angeles Interchange. Every day 550,000 vehicles merge across eight lanes of traffic, with signage that indicates seven different directions to go. You are syncing Coffee Klatch, and since you never exceed 3 miles per hour, there’s no problem. Should your screen show a flashing red light on top of a tiny police car, you have exceeded the 3 mph speed limit and must re-enter steps 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, and 8.
Now that you’ve synced your app, you are ready to access Coffee Klatch’s social networking feature, contacting other people who are driving through the same intersection. Go to Sync Coffee Nuts (1). Press Select (2), choose a password (3) that must have four letters (excluding u, x, b) and nine numbers, also including &. Your password will be rated Strong Klatch, Medium Klatch, Weak Klatch, or No Klatch. If your password is accepted, memorize it, then press Contact (4), and you will immediately be connected to five other people in cars around you. Go ahead, have a klatch, a chichat, a gossip-fest, a chinwag. Start with “How’s the smell of that Half Caff Soy Cappuccino?” If you wish to un-Klatch someone, simply press (5) Dump.
Troubleshooting. Occasionally people have noticed a tendency for Coffee Klatch to stop syncing, or to go backwards several steps. Until we fix this bug, please realize that the app may be trying to express dominance over you. You wouldn’t want a weak cup of coffee, would you?
Just re-sync.