You can measure a company’s confidence by the coffee mugs it foists on its customers and vendors. When they’re on the up and up you get these solid, large, beefy mugs in conventional shapes, printed with confident fonts and guaranteed to last you a good decade if you don’t manage to drop it (or, for some people I know, wash it). The mugs are heavy and they insulate your fingers from their steaming contents, or confidently carry a quiver of freebie branded pens, letter openers, styluses, pocket knives, USB sticks, and highlighters atop your desk at work. Even when the logos fade after many years of service, the mug stands tall and proud (and chipped) in the breakroom cabinet above the coffee pot, confidently hiding that 20-year-old can of Campbell’s Tomato Soup and the battered Swiss Miss packet.

When a company’s confidence is wavering you get more adventurous mugs, as though the company is trying to convince itself that its edgy new logo and lurid color scheme have proven that it has finally rounded that corner to sustainable earnings, and that we can all look past that massive recall and the untidy rumors of legal action. Yet the mugs are as ephemeral as the last-ditch corporate reinvention, strangely thin, and as like to blister your fingers, crack at the first splash of morning revival juice, or detonate in the microwave, as their maker is to survive the next 18 months. Even when they remain serviceable, their shape seems purposely designed to slosh staining coffee onto any new shirt you wear. They are hardly worthy even of holding the greasy, inkless pens with the logos rubbed out that you leave at the shipping desk.

I have an accumulation of such mugs at work and home — mugs from companies in good times and bad. They all cry out whenever I open the cabinet, begging, like their makers, for attention and a return to regular service. But I am a creature of habit and I have my favorites — good, reliable mugs whose spill propensities are known to be low. It helps that my favorites are now well stained with age and abuse (and thus my cooties), but others guarantee the availability of their favorites by more devious tricks, such as putting theirs in with the plates, or just leaving them at their desks each Friday, trusting that the first scalding splash of Monday coffee will kill anything still alive in their depths. We all avoid the spillers; like poison dart frogs, their vivid colors warn of the dangers therein (they keep the 20-year-old tomato soup company).