I am stupid and can't function before I've had my first coffee in the morning. Because my caffeine addiction impacts my brain like this, sometimes I mess up a step of preparing my coffee. If I don't put the carafe in properly and hit brew anyway, the coffee would brew and spill all over my counter. The people designing the coffee pot were smart, and knew that dumb people like me exist, so they installed the contact drip to prevent me from ruining my counters.