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perldiver at 04:31pm on 17/01/2007
perldiver at 04:31pm on 17/01/2007A few days ago, ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
avivasedai mentioned that she had originally started drinking coffee because it was the most acceptable "office vice". See, smokers go out for smoke breaks...and then stand around and socialize or talk about work stuff. Lots of useful stuff gets done during smoke breaks. (Although lots of time also gets wasted, and there's no way to tell which is which. It pisses the hell out of us non-smokers. I remember one company I worked at where the marketing guy seemed to take 2-3 smoke breaks an hour, each lasting 10-15 minutes. The head of Development often went with him, which pissed off all of us developers because we couldn't talk to our boss/lead developer/system architect when he was down sucking on a coffin nail in the parking garage. Then again, that company was more toxic that a Superfund site, so I suppose it just makes sense.)
Where was I? Oh, right. Acceptable vices. So, given that![[info]](https://stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif)
avivasedai finds smoking revolting, what other vice was there that would allow her to participate in the break-time work and socialization of the company? Answer: coffee.
Coffee is a fairly amazing thing when you think about it. The beans are grown a thousand miles away by poverty-stricken farmers for a few pennies a day. They are then flash-frozen and flown in a jet plane to your local Starbucks (which is now legally required to have at least one distribution point per street corner), where it is ground into dust, placed on a piece of soft paper which used to be a majestic redwood housing dozens of cute little snowy owls, and boiling water is passed through it. A cup of the resulting impure water is then sold for prices comparable to that of a bottle of crack cocaine. This impure water is then imbibed, often with the addition of cow milk and sucrose in order to make it taste less like road tar, by millions of otherwise normal people. It apparently has mild hallucinogenic properties, as many imbibers swear that the taste sensation is a pleasant one. These delusions were actually a key piece in a recent study of the olfactory sense; controlled double-blind experiments conducted in 2005 by professors at Nahdmuch U proved that the scent of this contaminated water (aka "coffee") was universally regarded as pleasant and that 98.97% of those who smelled the contaminated water before drinking it reported a pleasurable taste sensation, while 99.86% of the people who were prevented from smelling the water before tasting it expressed dissatisfaction with their imbibing experience, immediately before attempting to get rid of the taste by pouring sulfuric acid on their tongues.
The theory that evolved from these experiments was that, when faced with the cognitive dissonance of highly pleasurable scent information and utterly revolting taste information, the brain entered a state of "cognitive dissonance" which it resolved by the neurological equivalent of saying "Meh. Life's hard enough, let's focus on the smell and ignore the fact that it tastes like drain cleaner."
...Right. Um...that was a bit of a tangent there. Where was I? Oh yes,avivasedai picked up coffee as a lunchtime vice. Reasonable, I suppose. At the very least, it explains all the times that I've heard her say: "I got myself a coffee drink today. After I dumped half of it out and then filled it up with hot chocolate, milk, and sugar it tasted like yummy creamy chocolate with road tar. So I threw it out." I've been wondering for a while why she keeps getting these things...I mean, I think I learned that I didn't enjoy hitting myself in the head with a hammer after only one or two dozen trials. But, I'm sure she'll get it someday.
Anyway, we got to talking about what preferable vices would be. Wouldn't it be cool if sex was an acceptable office vice?
Think about it...how much more pleasant would your workplace be, not to mention your work experience, if everyone was permanently in a state of afterglow? The company could have highly paid, well-educated, attractive, well-insured, and guaranteed-drug-and-disease-free sex workers roaming the halls, looking for signs of stress and then dragging those stress-showing employees out for a mandatory break. Brings a whole new meaning to "taking one for the team", doesn't it?
Of course, then office workers would start taking acting lessons so as to better simulate the signs of stress and thus be forced to take breaks. And this would cause the cloth-dying industry to dye—I mean die, sorry— out as the universal clothing standard because black slacks, black turtlenecks, and a palpable aura of angst.
Hm. Well, I guess you can't make an omlette without breaking a few eggs. Me, I'm willing to take one for the team if that's what it requires to get the job done.
[Update: avivaseda has pointed out to me that I conflated two conversations in my head when writing this. She did not in fact pick up coffee because it was an acceptable "office vice". My bad. She also was amused that, after meeting lots of cool people at Arisia, this was my first post. My response: it was originally going to be much shorter, just a quick little throw-away piece written in a spare minute I had at lunch. It, uh, kinda ran away with me.]
avivasedai mentioned that she had originally started drinking coffee because it was the most acceptable "office vice". See, smokers go out for smoke breaks...and then stand around and socialize or talk about work stuff. Lots of useful stuff gets done during smoke breaks. (Although lots of time also gets wasted, and there's no way to tell which is which. It pisses the hell out of us non-smokers. I remember one company I worked at where the marketing guy seemed to take 2-3 smoke breaks an hour, each lasting 10-15 minutes. The head of Development often went with him, which pissed off all of us developers because we couldn't talk to our boss/lead developer/system architect when he was down sucking on a coffin nail in the parking garage. Then again, that company was more toxic that a Superfund site, so I suppose it just makes sense.)Where was I? Oh, right. Acceptable vices. So, given that
avivasedai finds smoking revolting, what other vice was there that would allow her to participate in the break-time work and socialization of the company? Answer: coffee.Coffee is a fairly amazing thing when you think about it. The beans are grown a thousand miles away by poverty-stricken farmers for a few pennies a day. They are then flash-frozen and flown in a jet plane to your local Starbucks (which is now legally required to have at least one distribution point per street corner), where it is ground into dust, placed on a piece of soft paper which used to be a majestic redwood housing dozens of cute little snowy owls, and boiling water is passed through it. A cup of the resulting impure water is then sold for prices comparable to that of a bottle of crack cocaine. This impure water is then imbibed, often with the addition of cow milk and sucrose in order to make it taste less like road tar, by millions of otherwise normal people. It apparently has mild hallucinogenic properties, as many imbibers swear that the taste sensation is a pleasant one. These delusions were actually a key piece in a recent study of the olfactory sense; controlled double-blind experiments conducted in 2005 by professors at Nahdmuch U proved that the scent of this contaminated water (aka "coffee") was universally regarded as pleasant and that 98.97% of those who smelled the contaminated water before drinking it reported a pleasurable taste sensation, while 99.86% of the people who were prevented from smelling the water before tasting it expressed dissatisfaction with their imbibing experience, immediately before attempting to get rid of the taste by pouring sulfuric acid on their tongues.
The theory that evolved from these experiments was that, when faced with the cognitive dissonance of highly pleasurable scent information and utterly revolting taste information, the brain entered a state of "cognitive dissonance" which it resolved by the neurological equivalent of saying "Meh. Life's hard enough, let's focus on the smell and ignore the fact that it tastes like drain cleaner."
...Right. Um...that was a bit of a tangent there. Where was I? Oh yes,
avivasedai picked up coffee as a lunchtime vice. Reasonable, I suppose. At the very least, it explains all the times that I've heard her say: "I got myself a coffee drink today. After I dumped half of it out and then filled it up with hot chocolate, milk, and sugar it tasted like yummy creamy chocolate with road tar. So I threw it out." I've been wondering for a while why she keeps getting these things...I mean, I think I learned that I didn't enjoy hitting myself in the head with a hammer after only one or two dozen trials. But, I'm sure she'll get it someday.Anyway, we got to talking about what preferable vices would be. Wouldn't it be cool if sex was an acceptable office vice?
Person A: Hey, person B, got a second? I want to run these boring and probably unimportant numbers past you.
Person B: Sure no problem. Do you mind if we do it in a few minutes though? I've really gotta run out for a quickie with that hot redhead in Cube G.
Person A: Oh yeah, sure. Give me a jingle when you get back.
Think about it...how much more pleasant would your workplace be, not to mention your work experience, if everyone was permanently in a state of afterglow? The company could have highly paid, well-educated, attractive, well-insured, and guaranteed-drug-and-disease-free sex workers roaming the halls, looking for signs of stress and then dragging those stress-showing employees out for a mandatory break. Brings a whole new meaning to "taking one for the team", doesn't it?
Of course, then office workers would start taking acting lessons so as to better simulate the signs of stress and thus be forced to take breaks. And this would cause the cloth-dying industry to dye—I mean die, sorry— out as the universal clothing standard because black slacks, black turtlenecks, and a palpable aura of angst.
Hm. Well, I guess you can't make an omlette without breaking a few eggs. Me, I'm willing to take one for the team if that's what it requires to get the job done.
[Update: avivaseda has pointed out to me that I conflated two conversations in my head when writing this. She did not in fact pick up coffee because it was an acceptable "office vice". My bad. She also was amused that, after meeting lots of cool people at Arisia, this was my first post. My response: it was originally going to be much shorter, just a quick little throw-away piece written in a spare minute I had at lunch. It, uh, kinda ran away with me.]
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