What a delicious assignment: invite 12 people to dinner at my Washington house, come up with any menu I want, hire someone to serve and clean up, and charge the whole feast to the company. I could hear the Champagne corks popping.
There were a few hitches. Everything had to come from the Internet, no going to the store, and I would have to write about it. There's no such thing as a free dinner.
Immediately, I e-mailed an invitation to our local Internet hero, America Online CEO Steve Case. A reply came by phone: Would we mind faxing the information?
Not at all, but if Mr. You've Got Mail regresses to old tech, can e-commerce really be that easy? With Case onboard, and TIME's Person of the Year issue to dangle before guests, I pursued a Noah's Ark theory of who else to invite: two members of Congress, two teachers, two candlestick makers. I warned everyone they would be TIME's guinea pigs. But when you're having Alan Greenspan to dinner, you realize the repercussions of a dyspeptic entree. Who wants to serve the meal that ends the longest economic expansion in peacetime history?
With the party set for Sunday night, the plan was to give myself a week to order, always starting online but resorting to 800 numbers in a pinch, find a middle ground between ordering the totally exotic (alligator meat) and the reliably prosaic (ham), and default to vendors in California when in doubt, figuring those geeks in Silicon Valley surely have figured out how to stuff a turkey through a modem.
First things first: I needed a new salt shaker (more than one coffee drinker had got a nasty surprise spooning salt out of the makeshift bowl I keep it in) and a tablecloth that actually fit. I ordered both from Williams-Sonoma williams-sonoma.com) This is where I first felt Screen Rage, a risk at many sites. This arises after you've just filled in every last scrap of personal data, except your shoe size and SAT scores, and the screen freezes on you. Don't think that Mr. Internet has saved anything for you. (If God is a woman, then the Web is a man, silent and indifferent, with a short attention span.) You have to start over. And over.
Getting great coffee was a comparative breeze. I went directly to the sources--a Hawaiian plantation, cornwellcoffee.com for Kona, and to bluemountaincoffee.com for Jamaica's Blue Mountain beans. This is also when I became a Coffee Bore. At most sites it's easier to get in than to get out, since Webmasters tend to fill all the space available, which online is infinite. Did you know that Kona beans thrive in the dark volcanic soil, sunny mornings and cloudy afternoons of Hawaii? I didn't either, but now I've brought it up at three parties. I've turned into the kind of person I used to avoid.