What's the difference between a coffee cup and a coffee mug? While the terms are used interchangeably, there actually is a difference. A coffee cup, per se, holds one cup of coffee. A coffee mug, on the other hand, holds more than a cup. How much coffee a coffee mug can hold depends entirely on the design of the mug.

Coffee Mug Collectors

There are a whole lot of people who collect coffee mugs, just like numismatics collect coins. I don't know what special term is used for coffee mug collectors, but I've know quite a few of them over the years. Many of the people I've known to collect coffee mugs were in the military, just like I was for 20 years.

These were people I knew as well as people I worked with. I never specifically collected coffee mugs, but I built up a collection nonetheless. It seems like I obtained a mug for every military unit I was with, for every Marine Corps birthday ball, for every recruiting function and everything between the gaps.

Some of the people I knew were fanatics about their collections, displaying them in special display cases in their homes or even at work.

A Dirty Coffee Cup is in the Mind of the Owner

Early in my military career, I cleaned a coffee mug for a senior enlisted fellow and he freaked out on me. Literally. I learned, and quite quickly I might add, that people like that wanted that nasty looking brown color on the inside of the mugs. Don't ask me why. I was constantly cleaning the coffee mugs I used.

The only time I ever saw one of the fanatics clean a coffee mug was when he left coffee in the mug, sitting out on a desk over the weekend. When he returned to work, there was green stuff floating, growing on the top of the liquid. I don't know what that stuff is, but it looks disgusting.

I'm a fanatic about coffee, but not about coffee mugs. Any coffee mug will do the trick for me. In fact, I only have four coffee mugs in my house here in the Philippines and I'm using one of them right now.

The Night Market at Subic Bay

Next to a carnival attraction called "Millennium", which is open for months out of the year, there's a night market. On the Christmas before last, one of my sisters-in-law bought a huge coffee mug from that night market and had my name "burned" onto it — "Richard" in some kind fancy writing. It held two times what a normal (if you can call any mug normal) coffee mug would hold. Now, since I'm the only Richard within a one-block radius, nobody could swipe my mug to use as their own without being seen by someone.

Alas, about two months ago, my younger son decided to make coffee for me. I was upstairs in my bedroom (where I am now) and doing my thing on the computer. By the way, my master bedroom is huge; it's big enough to hold two king-sized beds side by side. Anyway, he took my mug downstairs to get me coffee. While he was filling the coffee mug with hot water from our water dispenser, the bottle emptied. The mug was sitting on the spot where the water spillage goes, whatever you want to call it. He didn't move it before changing the water bottle and the jostling of the dispenser caused the mug to fall off and onto the floor. It's a tile-covered cement floor, I might add.

All the king's horses and all the king's men couldn't put Humpty-Dumpty together again. Or, in this case, my coffee mug. I don't know when I'll ever get another one quite like that.

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