My Coworker Thought the Coffee Machine Was Talking to Him
When we first hired Kevin to join our marketing team, he seemed like the perfect professional. He was a quiet, unassuming guy who dressed in crisp button-down shirts and always had his laptop bag organized. He was a good worker, consistently meeting his deadlines and offering solid ideas during our morning brainstorming sessions. For the first three weeks, I really thought nothing of him. He was just another face in the office. Then, things started to get weird in the breakroom. It started small. I noticed that Kevin began spending an unusual amount of time standing by our industrial coffee machine. That machine was a beast—a loud, clunky thing that hissed and groaned whenever it brewed a pot. It sat in the corner of the breakroom, a space with beige walls and flickering fluorescent lights that always made everyone look a little tired. One afternoon, I walked in to grab a cup of water, and I found Kevin leaning his ear directly against the side of the machine. He was holding his hand up to his face, eyes closed, looking like he was trying to catch a secret being whispered by the appliance. When he heard my footsteps on the linoleum, he jumped back. He looked incredibly nervous, frantically adjusting his glasses and acting as if he had been caught doing something illicit. I chuckled, figuring he was just checking for a leak or something. I asked him if the machine was broken, thinking maybe it was making a weird sound. Kevin looked at me with wide, panicked eyes. He leaned in close, lowered his voice to a hushed whisper, and told me that the machine had things to say. He claimed it understood the office better than any of us. He whispered that the machine knew everything—it knew who was getting promoted, who was unhappy, and even when the printer in the main hallway was going to jam. I laughed it off, thinking he was just trying to be funny, but he was completely serious. His face was pale, and he looked genuinely shaken by the information he was supposedly hearing. For the next few weeks, the atmosphere in the breakroom changed. It became a place I tried to avoid. Kevin stood there day after day, nodding at the coffee maker as if it were a colleague delivering a presentation. Sometimes he would murmur back, his lips moving in sync with the gurgling of the brewing cycle. He acted as if the machine was giving him deep, insightful career advice. It was uncomfortable to watch. People started avoiding the breakroom, choosing to get their caffeine from the cafe downstairs rather than deal with the weird energy Kevin was putting off. The whole office felt a bit colder. One rainy day, the tension hit a breaking point. I was in the breakroom again, trying to grab a quick snack before a client call. Kevin was there, standing closer to the machine than usual. As I turned to leave, he grabbed my arm. His grip was surprisingly tight. He leaned into my space and insisted that the machine was talking about money. He said it was relaying complex patterns to him. Then, he dropped the bomb: he told me it had commanded him to invest every single cent of his savings into a random, obscure digital coin I had never even heard of. I pulled my arm away, feeling genuinely unsettled. I tried to speak to him like a rational adult. I explained that a coffee machine cannot give financial advice, that it is literally a mass of wires, plastic, and metal designed to heat water. He just sighed at me with this look of pity, the kind of look you give someone who simply refuses to open their eyes to the truth. He told me I just didn't get it, that I was ignoring the signals that were right in front of me. I left the room, feeling like I needed to talk to HR, but I didn't want to get him in trouble if he was just going through a weird phase. By lunch, the rumor mill was already churning. Someone in accounting overheard Kevin on the phone, sounding frantic but excited, confirming a wire transfer of his entire savings account into that digital coin. The office vibe shifted from just plain weird to genuinely heavy. Nobody wanted to go into the breakroom anymore. The sound of that coffee maker—that loud, mechanical sputtering—became a trigger. We all started bringing our own coffee from home or just dealing with the headaches of caffeine withdrawal. We stayed away from that corner of the room, leaving Kevin to his conversations with the machine. I don't know if he lost his money or if he somehow made a fortune; he never spoke about his bank account again. The following week, he stopped drinking coffee entirely. He walked past the breakroom with his head down, clutching his bag as if the machine were a predator waiting to strike. He never mentioned the whispering or the financial advice ever again. He went back to being the quiet guy on the marketing team, but the damage to the office culture was done. To this day, I drink my coffee black, and I do it at my desk. If I am ever walking past the breakroom and I hear a slight hissing, a gurgle, or even a soft vibration coming from the machine, I do not stop to investigate. I just turn around and walk the other way. Some secrets are not worth knowing, and some machines are best left to make coffee in silence.