Youngweon Lee, Daily Editor and self-described “Carman hall coffee fairy” brought her coffee machine to Butler 209 last weekend. Here’s what happened.

We’ve all been there. We all knows what it feels like to know damn well at midnight that you’re not leaving Butler until 9am. You’re feeling kind of fresh now, out of desperation and procrastination, but you only have 2 more hours until the Butler Café closes, and you know you’re going to want to die around 4 or 5am without some form of caffeine. If you’re a normal person and don’t have caffeine pills or something, and just want plain old coffee, you might be in an annoying, coffee-less conundrum.

I have a very simple solution for you; bring your coffee machine to Butler. Trust me, I’ve done it. I know what your immediate reaction is; you’re probably wondering if I’m crazy, who I am, why I’m writing for Bwog, why Bwog lets me write for them, who runs Bwog these days, etc. I will explain what happened, but I first want to say that I can’t actually find a rule that says you can’t bring a coffee machine to the library. I mean, maybe it’s one of those common sense things, or maybe I’m just bad at looking through the library.columbia.edu website, but I can’t find it written anywhere that you can’t have a coffee machine in Butler, like it’s written all over the dorms. It says at the entrance of Butler that you can’t bring food in the building, but people do it all the time anyway. It doesn’t even say there not to bring coffee machines, but no one does it.

I should also clarify that by coffee machine I mean one of those cheap Mr. Coffee coffee machines, or maybe a small Keurig, not, for instance, a full-sized, professional espresso machine. (This should be common sense, but this article defies common sense, so I thought I would specify, just in case.) I have a nice tote from the Modern Greek department which is large enough to comfortably fit my Mr. Coffee coffee machine, my bag of coffee filters, and my container of French vanilla-flavored ground coffee, so I just brought it in that bag.

It was around 1am when I came to Butler 209 with said coffee machine, so not very many people were in the room. I still probably got some looks when I whipped out a literal coffee machine in the middle of Butler 209, but I had an entire Lit Hum essay to write, and could not care less about the haters. My classmate who was with me writing that same paper looked shocked initially, but he was on the same boat; he needed the coffee more than he was weirded out by the coffee machine. We probably made a good 3-4 pots of coffee between the two of us before the sun rose. Our papers would not have been finished without that coffee.

Me taking a nap on the grass after this wild night

Do be careful with the machine, though. I had a lot of papers and books scattered around me as I was typing on my laptop, sipping my coffee, and I spilled my coffee on my keyboard. I didn’t spill much and I wiped it off really fast, and my computer kept working for a bit, but then it stopped working. I freaked out, and Ubered to the Apple store on 5th & 58th (which is 24 hours, by the way!), got it fixed, and Ubered back. I got back to Butler at 5:20am, restarted my essay from scratch, finished it, finished a presentation I had to give in my 10:10am class, and revised, printed, and submitted my essay, all by 9:30am. I digress, but my point is that you should just be careful not to spill your coffee.