On the fourth floor of my almost quiet building, near the Marginal Pineheiros, stands a coffee and tea dispenser. After struggling with it a few times, I noticed the name on it: Sirio. Apparently this is the Brasilian branch of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation, still going strong in this quadrant of the galaxy.

Its unthreatening, even jolly and excitingly chunky appearance, puts the potential user off his guard. The little message in the middle of the machine invites the user (in Espanol, not Portugues), to "Choose a drink and push the button". There are eleven drink choices and eleven blank non-choices scattered across the face of the machine, each with three buttons that could be pushed. To the right is a coin slot and a paper money reader. There are no prices anywhere, so you put money in and press a button, and then the machine flashes a number in it's little message box, which seems to signify any deficit it feels might exist.

If you have fed it sufficient money (and Brasil changed its coins back in 1998, but the machine only accepts the old money), then pressing a button results in a bewildering sequence of noises and silences, during which the word "esperar" appears in the box. In Espanol as well as Portugues, this means "to wait" and in an interesting efficiency, also means "to hope". If you don't watch this little sign, and simply wait until you think the drink is prepared, you will likely reach in and scald your hand as you withdraw the cup, because the machine falls silent for just the right amount of time to cause this behaviour, and then dumps the scalding hot liquid it has been preparing.

If you do wait. Then you will find that the cup is a special thin plastic precisely balanced to withstand the coffee's heat while costing as little as possible to manufacture, and the result is an exercise in manual dexterity to grasp the cup with enough force to avoid dropping it or crushing it, but not so much as to be scalded right through the cup wall.

This is what expatriots do in Brasil when they have been sitting at their desks too long.