“It’s never been easier!” they lied…
Yes. Nespresso lied to me.
“It’s never been easier to recycle your coffee pods”.
Bull.
The reason I chose a Nespresso coffee machine was so I could drink delicious coffee at home without having it on my conscience that I was filling up landfill sites with hundreds of plastic capsules, as I was doing with my Tassimo machine previously.
(You might say I should shun coffee machines altogether if I’m concerned about the environment, and maybe I will one day, but right now great coffee at home is one of my few indulgences, so I will fight back with weak justifications like, “At least I’m not a heroin addict!”, in order to defend my position.)
It used to be really easy to recycle the pods. Nespresso have a very neat system where they send you bags to fill with your used pods.
In the past, when you made an online order for coffee pods, you could click a button that requested collection of your bags of used pods.
All you had to do was select how many bags you had for collection, and they were magically whisked away when your new pods were delivered.
It was as easy as breathing in and out.
Anyway, for reasons I can only assume are economically driven, Nespresso changed their Pod Back service.
Now, you have four choices - you can take them back to a shop (my closest shop is miles away so not an easy option for me), you can arrange for kerbside collection (I found out that’s not an option in my postcode area), you can print off a label and take it to your local Post Office (f*ck that - it means printing stuff (ugh) getting in my car and talking to grumpy, suspicious post-officers who treat every parcel like you’re trying to send a bomb, or drugs, or traffic live puppies), or arrange home collection by the Royal Mail.
The last option is one that seemed on first glance to be the easiest for me, but when I went down the route of trying to fill in the online forms, far from being “easier than ever”, I found it a total pain in the arse.
So painful, in fact, (because filling in forms is my pet hate) that I totally cut off my own nose to spite my face and went into a Mexican stand-off with Nespresso that ended up with me amassing a small mountain of eleven bags of coffee pods, as pictured here a couple of weeks ago:
I moaned to Kev of my plight and, always one to find the route of least resistance, his suggestion was “F*ck it - just put them in the bin…” but my environmental conscience wouldn’t allow that to happen.
I knew I was going to have to dig deep and fill in the forms, knowing that the longer I was leaving it the more painful it would be, because you had to fill in a whole new form for each bag.
So, a couple of weeks ago, I mentally steeled myself for the Pod Back Return Experience: days of extensive therapy sessions, a weekend yoga retreat, a colon cleanse and a four-hour meditation leading up to the opening of my laptop to start form-filling (I’m joking, obviously - it was only three hours meditation…).
By the time I’d filled in ten forms, I was actually getting quite comfortable with the process, even though the entire process took 14 clicks plus a total of 12 fields to type information into (including a really annoying one right at the end where you have to re-confirm your email address and click two more buttons just to tell them YET AGAIN that you REALLY DO want them to process your request. Kill. Me. Now).
I am now gamifying the process by going against the clock, and my current personal best Podback time is 2 minutes 8.38 seconds from first click inside the Nespresso website to on-screen confirmation of collection.
I’m quite proud of that, but it’s a far cry from the ease at which I used to be able to arrange a collection.
“What’s the coaching lesson here, you mad bint?” you might be wondering in exasperation.
Well, there are many in fact, but the one to focus on today is how the gap between expectations and reality is the place where all your frustration is found.
When Nespresso said “It’s easier than ever!” I was very excited.
I like it when mundane tasks are made easier.
Who doesn't?
My expectations were set in a split second when I read that sentence.
However, the reality was the process was ten times longer, and that pissed me off.
I’m OK with it now because I’m used to the process - it’s my “new normal” as they used to say in the COVID years, but it has taken some time to adjust.
If they’d been honest and said “We have a different process” then I might have been less stroppy and defiant when I found it harder than the old one, and allowed myself the mental space to try it for the first time, in the same way I take deep breaths before assembling flat-packed furniture.
So, the next time you blow a fuse about something, ask yourself if it’s simply because you had the wrong expectations. It might help you ground yourself a little faster.
(Or you could go down Kev’s route and just throw things/people in the bin)