The Importance of Caffeine.

Anyone who's ever had a job in an office, restaurant, or on set (or anyone who's read a previous post of mine) knows the importance of having plenty of coffee on hand in the work place.

So can someone explain to me why, on a shoot with an ungodly call time of 5am, there was no coffee available until three hours in?

And why (on a different job) there was not one drop of coffee on set during an overnight shoot??

Most shows I work on do a pretty good job of keeping a steady supply of the stuff, but this lack of foresight happens more often to me than it should. And for those of you out there who think I'm just being whiny, I'm not the only one who feels this way.

One time when I was on a caffeine deprived set, I watched as a grip heard the news, stopped what he was doing and walked out of the studio. He didn't return until half an hour later with a bag of energy drinks and bottled coffee from a store down the street. Another time while on location, the gaffer sent out an electric to make a run down to Starbucks and just last month, a grip showed up almost an hour late. The reason: the Key Grip called him right before he pulled into crew parking and asked him to buy a few cups of coffee since it was obvious that there wasn't going to be any on set anytime soon. And the night shoot that had no coffee (not even a Coke to tide us over)? By 3am, everyone was either sleeping in the back of the grip truck, in the cab, or on a lawn chair in the yard of the house we were shooting at. And that's including the Key and Gaffer.

Oddly enough, it's the ultra low budget shows that seem to be the ones caught without a drop coffee in sight. I don't know if it's because they cut costs by handling crafty themselves or what, but if I was paying my crew with money that was barely in the budget as it is, I'd rather pay a few more bucks to make sure there's at least a Mr. Coffee on set than to have my crew sleeping or going on a coffee run in the middle of the shoot.

...Or at least have the decency to send out a PA.