I thought I had planned everything perfectly. I scheduled two days off for the beginning of March Madness and the NCAA wrestling tournament.

If I went into work on those days, I would have no motivation so I figured I might as well just spend the time in our basement watching TV and relaxing.

For 24 hours, the plan worked perfectly. I had a wonderful day on Thursday bouncing between online updates and the action on my TV. I chatted with friends and managed to not worry too much about my brackets.

When Friday rolled around, I had everything planned out. Basketball didn’t start until a little afternoon, leaving me time to enjoy the early wrestling action when it kicked off at 10:30.

Before that, Maria and I could catch up on the Thursday night comedies we had recorded. I got up at a reasonable hour, grabbed the last cup of the coffee she had made earlier and settled into my spot on the couch. Nothing could stop me, or so I thought.

After one show and one cup of Joe, I decided to brew another pot. We drink half-caffeinated coffee in the morning, but I needed some of the real stuff if I wanted to achieve my goal of doing nothing productive for the rest of the day.

I put the grounds in the filter. I put the filter in the basket. I filled up the machine with water. I plugged the machine in and went into the other room while the coffee brewed. When I returned a few minutes later, panic set in.

The pot was still empty. I checked the plug, and then made sure I had the machine turned on. I hadn’t screwed up that way. Maria and I pushed things and looked quizzically at the empty pot. We had no idea what happened, but we knew one of our greatest fears had come true.

The coffee maker died.

We do have backup plans in place, but I had kind of denied this day would ever come. I guess I didn’t want to deal with the reality of needing a cup of coffee and finding that my main method of satisfaction had quit on me.

I immediately gained a great deal of interest in the errand Maria had asked me to run earlier that morning. I knew that plenty of places on the outside could satisfy my craving while I mulled over what kind of new coffee maker we could get.

So many options now exist. We didn’t have to settle for your run of the mill plain coffee maker. In the end, we did because I’m cheap, but I got to experience the thrill of imagining how our lives would change if we had some fancy machine to brew one cup at a time.

In the end, that merely added some excitement to one of my favorite weekends of the year. I ran the errand, got my coffee, check out coffee makers and still made it home in time to catch all of my sports on television.

I will definitely take those two days off again next year, but I think I might make an emergency coffee backup plan just in case. I like to learn from my mistakes.