Tea rounds in the office

[Jackie]

Here’s a very British topic in an article about tea rounds in the workplace. You know; about who has to brew the stuff and why it matters at all. It’s interesting to those elsewhere too since it shows how important tea can be to office life. On some islands of the world anyway. I’ve seen plenty of devices, invented with the sole purpose of making the organization of this important ritual easier. Fed up with always being the chosen one to make the tea? Just click on the random tea generator, and life is suddenly so much more fair. It’s hard to imagine that tea plays such a crucial role in offices that there’s a need for such gadgets, or countless blog posts about the subject. But there is. Tea is at least as important as pen and paper. Perhaps not as important as the desktop computers, but a close second. 

The article I’m linking to focusses on an aspect I might have overlooked. Solo tea making is bad! If you’re going it alone you’re wasting energy and costing British businesses just under $52m a year! That’s a lot of money just because someone doesn’t trust others to make the perfect tea.

Would you make tea for your colleagues and risk their wrath, or lack of warmth if you didn’t get it right? I would. Except if I had to make a cuppa for @thedevotea. Serving Robert a bag in a plastic cup would be akin to taking that jump off the pretty Golden Gate bridge. Madness of course.

Peruse the article by The Guardian’s Bim Adewumi here.

[Xavier]

And if you are the only one to drink tea in the office? 😛

[Robert Godden]

I read the article, and it merely reinforced how standards have generally slipped.

I worked in an office of about 100 people, and every morning and afternoon I would make myself a pot of tea in the kitchen. I started with a small one-person pot, but people would start co-incidentally turning up at 11 and 3. I was eventually making about 10 cups each time.

I became annoyed that the company provided filter coffee but only tea bags, so I took it up with management with an unassailable argument ” You want us to interview people for $1m jobs over a supermarket teabag?”

I didn’t get any reaction until I was promoted and ended up being responsible for the office amenities budget. RESULT!

From then on, 1 kilo bags of decent tea flowed into the office with great regularity.

I left after six years. I was told that the teapot was used a few times in the week after my absence, and then shelved.

Now, I have my own office with access to close to 100 teas. When I have been forced to work elsewhere,. I take a teapot and a half a dozen teas.

As far as the energy consumed, the argument is nonsensical. As usual, it picks one factor in isolation. What about less heating being needed because people are actively getting up and walking around the office and are full of warm tea?

Douglas Adams used statistical mathematics to prove that we don’t exist. That’s statistics for you…

[bram]

* @xavier: then either you work alone or work at the wrong place 😉

Or you could start changing it.

[Xavier]

@bram I am not alone but in my floor, I am the only one and in both floors, I am the only one willing to experiment.

But I am already working on the spreading of tea cups.

@thedevotea Company providing you with coffee and tea? We use our own. The company gives us the coffee machine and the boiling kettle (the kettle I use is mine).

[Author]

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