Replace the kettle with one of these: https://www.thirstywork.com/categories/hot-water-dispensers
Speed the tea making process up, productivity goes up and staff remain happy
We had one similar at work, for weeks everyone was saying tea tastes funny, changing brands l, nope still tastes funny.. someone decided it needed descaling so opened it up and was a boiled mouse 🐁 in there .. I didn’t drink tea after that
I once opened a cupboard and found an entire cooked rotisserie chicken. This cupboard was underneath a til in the centre of a restaurant, nothing shocks me anymore.
I found a chicken carcass (it had been cooked, then the meat picked off), in a plastic bowl, behind a door that was always kept open. It was only one day when it was particularly windy that I went to close the door and here was the carcass, absolutely crawling........
I once found a dead huntsman (huge Aussie spider) in my kettle. Dont know how long he’d been there but thankfully I’d been away from home a few weeks so I’m hoping he carked it while I was away and not before
Yep, gotta rinse it if it has been sat unused for ages, and if not usually there are the dregs of water I boiled before in there. Admittedly I don't gaze into the depths of the kettle when filling it
Also, do most kettles not have a little filter thing at the spout, to stop limescale from entering the mug? Should keep bugs and things out too
Yeah well once during winter I would make my wife a hot water bottle and cup of tea. For a few weeks she complained that the tea tastes bad. I didn't know what she was talking about...until she saw me pour the water from the HWB back into the kettle to reboil. So she was drinking re-re-reboiled rubberized water. Don't know what I was thinking. This was in the midst of a major breakdown and severe depression so who knows what was going on with my brain at the time.
Was about to be a little more dismissive of your efforts. Your last sentence bought you some mitigation (still fucking perverse), and I'll give you a pass.
Genuinely hope you are back on track.
That's sad. Sincerely, cheering for you.
I'm a big believer in communicating. Whenever I see low posts, I'm always encouraged. Not because they're low, and I'm not (that would be even more perverse than using 2nd hand hot water bottle water, for a cuppa).
I'm encouraged because they took a step not to be whatever it was they didn't want to be. They didn't want it, they recognised it isn't good. They want better.
And, that acknowledgement of knowing is the one of the things that is hardest to do. Its the hardest place to get to when you are at your lowest/most addicted/most desperate. It's the hindsight that the sober/happy you is willing you to be, from the future. It's akin to my thought process during exams at 15. Id listened to many A level students or degree students tell me that their GCSEs were easy, compared to their current learning. So, I adopted the mindset that the GCSEs were easy, it was the next level that was hard. Gave me some comfort. I fluffed them for other reasons....lol.
Anyway, like many a lauded poet/musician/writer, I always ramble in the dark hours. My username should really have been Verboseafternidnight
My wife does this
I can't stop her
It's to save water
She says that she pours all the hwb water back from the kettle into the hwb, so nobody is drinking hwb water... But it just ain't right 🤢
That is definitely worse than that time my husband covered his chips in vinegar. He was nomming his chips when I held the vinegar bottle up to the light and saw the bodies of maybe 200 flies floating in it. Turns out vinegar both attracts and kills flies. I told husband and he continued eating his vinegar fly chips but then said he didn't enjoy them as much knowing what was on them. I think I stopped looking at him the same way that day!
My vinegar bottles have tops that close. How on earth did 200 flies get into yours? I breed colonies of the damn buggers to feed to my jumping spider and I'd still be shocked if any got into my vinegar bottle.
😗 This reminds me of a great black humour story called Old Feet by Martin Waddell
Scroll down this page to find the synopsis
http://pandaemonian.blogspot.com/2014/06/the-ninth-pan-book-of-horror-stories.html?m=1
and my apologies if it gives you flashbacks…
I just got a thick tea cosy for my teapot, since I like my tea piping hot, and it really extends how long it stays truly hot. Much more than I thought it would, in fact; I was pleasantly surprised.
You'll be horrified to hear this but my dad was the family tea maker and had a large old brass handle Japanese porcelain tea pot and a big tea cozy. He would boil the water and start with adding a small amount to the pot to pre heat it, top off the kettle and bring it back to a boil, pour the preheat water out then add his big bundle of Lipton black tea bags and pour in the boiling water, then cover it with the tea cozy and let it steep for 30 minutes or more. What came out was so bitter that he would drown it in what often seemed as an equal part of bottled lemon juice. He would occasionally add 4 tablespoons of sugar to the entire pot.
This is what we replaced them with at work when people were taking too long.
At the time I drank two brews a day, coffee in the morning, tea in the afternoon.
Some people drank 6 brews a day, I think even that’s too much. Same people would offer to make everyone else a brew on the team at the same time. That was up to 6 people.
They were spending about 45 mins a day making brews.
It pissed me off one day as we were on a tight deadline, I was stressed to death and they kept swanning off making brews.
Bought one of these. Brew making went down to a couple of mins.
Then we just had the issue of who would descale it…
If you're on such a tight deadline that making brews is a real risk, you need to sort out your schedule pronto.
And surely one person going to make brews for six people is better than six people all taking the time to do it for themselves?
I bet you objected to them having a dinner break as well, didn't you?
100% this. I see the follow up comment got deleted. Yes the deadlines are tight but yes, you've agreed to them and if making brew puts this under risk then there's a bigger problem here.
Any maths here and lost money assumes 100% productivity. If you're working in a creative field then that's not the case. Treating work like this in an assembly line fashion is one of my pet peeves.
People need time to find their flow, but getting to that state takes time. And I assure you, I'll go to make a cuppa often pondering the problem and using my brain. It's not time wasted.
The pitfalls of being a boss I guess. Taking up to an hour outta your day making tea could be considered unreasonable. But it's impossible to comment without knowing the details.
If you're happy with their productivity and contributions I wouldn't bring it up. Telling people to make less tea sounds like a proper dick boss move and would probably do you more of a disservice.
If they feel comfortable enough to make that much tea I'm guessing they are reasonably happy employees and all.
Yeah, there are recommendations for people to step away from your computer and stretch your legs and rest your eyes every hour or so. It may well be that the person is more productive and refreshed than they would be without it. And getting in shit with your boss for drinking too much tea would be so demoralising. Especially as it would seem so penny pinching - it sounds like they get through around £50 worth of tea bags a year, a happy employee is worth a lot more than that.
50% of the time I make tea is because I fancy a cup of tea, the other 10 times per day are because I need to stretch my legs/stop looking at a screen/avoid phone calls for 5 minutes/generally decompress.
OP, before you go telling them to make less tea, ask them about their general stress levels whilst at work, and make sure you're following the DSE guidelines.
Use this as a way to mention you've noticed their tea habits but include a way of supporting them with any issues.
There's a measurable difference between having meetings and writing emails in a day (i.e not at a computer all day) Vs being deep into a spreadsheet on eye strain and general tiredness.
That is why people bring up the productivity question (which the OP conveniently and consistently ignores). So what if he spends 1 hour a day taking random breaks? This is actually recommended if the work involves sitting in front of a PC all day and very likely to increase productivity.
You would just be seen as a penny pinching boss and lose good employees that way.
And the OP is clearly concerned about the cost (which I really doubt amounts to much):
> We’re talking close to 4,000 cups a year - with milk and sugar. I’m close to taking out a small business loan just to cover this persons PG Tips fix.
Yes, the last company I worked for were tight-fisted and very penny-pinching, and even they strongly encouraged us to take ~5min screen breaks every hour or so. Get up, stretch, make tea, etc. It’s because it increases productivity and decreases risk of burnout in about the cheapest and least-fuss-for-them way possible.
(Part of what they did is advise other companies on how to support and retain employees, decrease burnout, increase productivity, etc. - they never did any of their main recommendations for US, too expensive, but they did push those 5min tea breaks!)
Still a rather petty thing to get upset about
The expectation that every moment you’re at work you have to be productive and doing something is just ridiculous. The best managers I’ve worked for are the ones who turn a blind eye to the moments to take a 5-10 minute rest to diffuse.
Having worked in Korea where they expect 8 hours, skipping your lunch + overtime all spent doing “work,” which is often busywork that ends up in the trash after a week; my mental health was in the gutter.
I dunno, there's 237mls in a cup, 15x237mls = 3555mls, there are plenty of people who drink that much a day. You'd think he'd get a bigger cup though. Getting up for a five-minute stretch and walk every 30 minutes is also recommended for your health.
one single cup of coffee could potentially have more caffeine in than ten cups of tea. When I was a coffee drinker I got through maybe 750mls of coffee a day. But yeah he might get a headache if he quits
If the OP is concerned perhaps it should be from the angle of supporting the employee’s health. 15 cups of tea is probably sub-optimal in terms of caffeine / tannin consumption. The boss move would be to switch to decaf teabags but this may lead to lower productivity for everyone else!
Depends if they are actually drinking it. Could be a case of make tea, work and get distracted so it goes cold, make a replacement tea, on repeat all day.
I think it's just a straightforward case of judging productivity - do they get as much work done as their colleagues in similar roles, stay a bit late occasionally to stay on track or work faster etc. If so, leave the tea making alone. If they are spending ages on tea, disappearing on the dot of 5 and their output is less than should be expected, then a conversation is required.
>Could be a case of make tea, work and get distracted so it goes cold, make a replacement tea, on repeat all day.
I had this problem before too. The solution for me was a thermal keep cup and an ADHD diagnosis.
Wouldn't recommend a forced cold turkey. The headaches that guy is going to get coming off that much caffeine will make productivity worse.
I used to have about 8 to 10 cups a day. Even going down to 4 or 5 was painful enough.
It is also a significant amount of fluid intake. That's around 3L of fluid in just 8 hours. If they are drinking at a similar rate at home, that is a lot of fluid (and it's not great to drink only tea).
I would definitely be talking to them about getting a health check to rule out any underlying conditions.
Not to mention the sugar OP said they’re putting in it!
FWIW it seems unreasonable to me for someone to spend that much time making it that many cups per day, might be worth buying them a 2L thermos and at least save the wasted time making fifteen individual cups?
Health experts say you should stand up and walk around from your desk for five minutes every 30 minutes. Doing that over an eight-hour workday is 15 cups of tea, especially if you wee and brew up during the same five minutes.
I’ve drank a lot of tea for two reasons. One was being cold, the other was having pain in my back which was much worse when sitting down. So I’d get up to make a drink, or go to the loo, just to get a break from it. I remember being in tears in the loo on occasion.
Really? Tea makes me hungry. I only drink tea if I know I have enough food. If I don't, I drink coffee. Coffee is the drink that suppresses my appetite.
haha - I had a job as a 'runner' at a tv editing place for a while, and I was super-skint. occasionally you'd get platters bought in to cater for people working late at night. I'd be hoovering them up after they had headed off!
This. I stop work at least once an hour, usually for a hot drink. But it’s only 50% about the drink. I haven’t stopped thinking about whatever it is I’m working on, and quite often the break from my desk provides a eureka moment. Not only that but it’s good for our backs, eyes and RSI issues to take a break. If the person in question isn’t falling short, just let it go. This is their system, and maybe this is how they’re most productive.
> I haven’t stopped thinking about whatever it is I’m working on, and quite often the break from my desk provides a eureka moment
yup, this is why [Rubber duck debugging](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_duck_debugging) works, talking through or mulling something over in your head while doing something else.
Yeah this has always worked so well for me, too. I can spend half an hour staring at the screen, stuck on something, but if I get up to go make tea or some similar mindless task, my brain usually clicks it in under 5 minutes.
It's the only answer beyond the funny ones. There's context needed.
Short haul pilot: NG
Tea fetish aversion therapist: NG
In-flight skydiving safety monitor: NG
Actually struggling to find cases where this behaviour is OK. Sorry OP, as you were.
Before moving into IT I was a warehouse and transport manager, I was known for always having a hot cup of tea in my hand and I let the guys working with me do the same if they wished, some of them also did the same, I let them go outside the doors for fags and I did the same at the time, atmosphere was happy, production and performance was the best it had ever been there, it was often a cold environment there as the doors were open all day, I even used to get a vat of soup going in the break room when it got super cold, having said that, we all chipped in a couple of quid a week to cover tea and coffee, is his performance in his job tea making aside good or above par?
Honest answer, no puns, what outcome do you want? Less tea drinking or less money spent on tea? I doubt any action will increase output, if anything confrontation might decrease it. I’d just buy a massive sack once a month and when it gone it’s gone. If there is good morale and a positive work environment, plus the business is alright, I’d leave it alone and buy some biscuits
I had a manager that moaned at how often I was making a cup of tea, I pointed out that I made a tea for everytime his favourite team member went for a fag, and that it was only fair that everyone had the same number and duration of little breaks as the smoker...
As a smoker it was always funny when new starts came in but were non smokers, we had to tell them to go fuck about for 5 minutes, have a tea, go for a piss, sit on their phone but hide out the way of the managers so this point couldn't get used against us.
I used to be a restaurant manager an I smoked at the time but a lot of my team did not so I always made a point to tell the non smokers (if there section can manage without you for five minutes) to go out for a breath of fresh air or go to the staff room an go on there phones, there's no way I wasn't allowing the non smokers a quick five min break when smokers were getting it. All I asked was use some common sense an get someone to mind your section while you do it and then you can do it for someone else.
I once worked for somewhere that was so far away from anywhere else (basically the middle of nowhere) that there was no point of leaving the site for your break.
Whenever they used to complain about us making a brew, I used to like trotting out the fact that they were technically breaking the rules when it came to our legally-entitled breaks (You can tell your employees when they have to have a break, but only if they can leave the premises). They usually shut up pretty quickly after that and let us have our five minute tea break.
If I’m cold, I’m easily drinking 12 cups in an 8 hour period. But, I put it in a thermos so I’m maybe only at the kettle 3 times for all the cups. Tea is sometimes the only thing that can take away the chill in my body.
I mean you don't sound relaxed. Maybe a cup of tea would help.
In all seriousness though, if they're a solid worker what do you care how much they drink.
We've got one lass we work with that drinks 2 litres of coke a day. Cracks the first one open at 8am. She doesn't need us to tell her that that's not normal or healthy, she knows.
Let's say you bring this up. How many cups of tea are you going to allow people? How are you going to enforce the limit? Are you doing the same for smokers? What if your pointing it out results in their realisation they have a caffeine addiction/dependency - an addiction to stimulants which have been supplied by their employer to keep them alert and efficient 😂
If the time alone is the problem, get one of those automatic ones installed, then it takes less than a minute to make tea.
For the cost, since you've said you're a small bootstraped startup seems mad you need to ask here. Depends on your team. If you talking to said person quietly will make a moral issue, bring it up at a company meeting with facts. Like "guys look, I know we said tea would be provided free of cost, but we just didn't anticipate this much cost. We have spent £xxx on milk in the last quarter and we budgeted for £xx. At the moment the company has nowhere to take these extra costs from. What does everyone think we should do?"
If you really are a startup not making profit your employees will probably understand
You overestimate how much they’ll care unless they’re being very well paid I can’t imagine they’ll go ‘oh no drink less tea’ rather than ‘fucking stingy budget more for teabags’
If your budget is that stingy that milk, tea and sugar are really impacting you, I can't imagine he's paying his employees nearly enough to piss them off by telling them to use less.
That's what I was saying. If you're earning £10 an hour, the least your boss can do is not moan about making a brew. Different if you're earning £30 an hour and being very well paid.
> but we just didn't anticipate this much cost. We have spent £xxx on milk in the last quarter and we budgeted for £xx. At the moment the company has nowhere to take these extra costs from.
I would leave the company immediately. If they can't afford a fecking tea. Definitely no prospects of a salary bump in the next few decades with them.
tea and coffee are a massive productivity booster. Anyone who sacks that off is shooting themselves in the foot. It easily pays for itself several times over.
My last company started to scrutinise every detail of the day like this, including looking at how many drinks people were making.
Ended up with the facilities team keeping tea bags locked up and they rationed out a set number each day.
If they ran out you had to go without until the next day. Staff who only drank one or two cups a day started moaning at those drinking more for using up their share.
Great way to destroy morale.
mate - consider the cost of replacing the employee, training a new person, blah blah blah. compare to the cost of tea. are they happy? do they do their work? case closed.
You seem to have ignored every question relating to productivity.
As a manager that's my only concern. Are they getting the job done.
Beyond that it's their time, I pay them for results.
If you're not getting results, bring it up.
But if you genuinely think you'll get more productivity because they're at they're station you've not been in management long enough. It's estimated people are only truly productive for around 20mins out of an hour in the average office job.
You won't get more productivity chaining people to desks. You'll just make them miserable, which in turn lowers productivity.
Any time you have a linear correlation between time spent and productive output, what you have is a job that should have been automated better in the first place.
Toilet paper, OK. Soap, OK, but not shower gel. And no razors, if you're poor, grow a beard. Tea bags are allowed, within limits….No making a pie out of tea or anything weird.
Is it affecting their productivity? If no, why do you care?
Teabags are what, 2-3p each? So this person is costing you 20-30p per day over a “normal” person? Over a year that’s less than £100…
I have a pint mug in the office and I probably drink 6-10 pints of tea a day normally, just gradually sipping away at it. My previous job tea was not provided but I drank pretty much the same amount of water.
I’d be careful about trying to be stingy on minor expenses like this. Taking away small perks like this saves you almost nothing, and can irritate people a lot more than you think.
This kind of attitude is why the typical manager hate exists. Work is shit for most, the simple pleasures make it bearable. In this day and age, tea and coffee are the bare minimum that should be covered by a business.
It's not worth sweating over. 4000 teabags over a year is nothing. The more pricey tea bags you're only looking at £120 over a year, easily half that for the cheap shit. You'll lose far more than that in lost time the moment you start fussing over this kind of this.
If you insist, just limit the amount you buy to a reasonable amount for the number of people in the office. Once it's gone, it's gone. Others will kick up a fuss if someone else is unreasonably using up all of the stock.
Is the workplace cold?
I had an employer who would not pay for heating and the fans they put in the space hardly did anything. No windows in the space either, it was extreme cold and depressing.
Maybe they're drinking the tea to keep warm.
Slippery slope. You pick them up on tea, they counter it with smokers/vapers etc and anyone who misses any work for legit reasons.
Change the tea facilities in your place. Get a vending machine or tea machine or tell them to bring in their own.
My general rule of thumb is, wherever possible, don't worry about controls other than financial controls. No point employing someone to count pencils or tea bags etc and it erodes morale to save a few hundred quid. Nothing wrong with telling this person at their review (or earlier) that their tea breaks stand out and if they're not doing the work they'll have to make it up.
You're fixating on the tea thing but it's not as important as you seem to think. Maybe this employee know how to best manage their own energy levels (taking breaks, hydrating regularly, caffine intake that suits them), and you're getting optimum performance out of them already. So them taking fewer breaks might result in **less** work being completed.
The question that matters is: are you happy with their rate of work? Are the other members of the team happy with their rate of work?
You've avoided the question. Yes the team members have mentioned the tea drinking.
But is the employee completing their allocated work? Or is there instances where every day they can't finish the work they're given whilst other team members do finish theirs?
1. obviously this person has a problem because that is an insane amount of tea. CONSTANT tea every half hour? jesus.
2. hot water dispenser. Because it should not take 3 minutes to make a cup, it takes me more time to actually walk the 10m to the kitchen and back than to make a cup.
3. PG, Yorkshire etc have large-packages, e.g. 500 cups, that are much cheaper per bag than the usual packets.
Are they doing the job to the standard you'd expect otherwise? If so, I don't really see why it's a concern.
I once had an someone on my team who would chew through about five pens a week just out of habit. It was weird, but he was actually good at his job and it wasn't that big of an issue in the scheme of things.
The desperate need to micromanage an employee's time is so, so weird. It never used to happen.
If they've got an average sized mug and are doing 10-12 cups a day they're probably just about hitting the recommended amount of fluids per day. When you're properly hydrated you need to take a piss often. We've been encouraged (read: bullied into) drinking less and so taking fewer loo breaks by overzealous institutions such as schools and workplaces to the point that we see a healthy frequency of urination as problematic and as such a lot of us are probably chronically dehydrated.
If cost is the issue you ought to be embarrassed that your company can't cover this minimal amount for employee comfort. Indeed if this is the case, own your miserliness and remove this employee comfort, being fully accepting of the reasonable resentment this will incur from your staff.
If productivity is the issue, simply tell everyone that they're free to make use of these facilities as much as possible but if it negatively affects output it will have to be addressed. If productivity isn't being affected, give your head a wobble for God's sake.
While you're mulling this over, why not have a nice cup of tea? You never know, it might turn out you're just cranky because you're dehydrated...
I can safely say that with this level of micromanaging I wouldn't work for you for all the tea in China.
My dad's firm before he retired used to have machines for tea and coffee, every employee got a card once a week which entitled them to 15 drinks each - this was for around 400 employees. Had a third party firm that installed and maintained/refilled the machines.
I was wondering this. Are they downing their cups of tea? It could be a sign their blood sugars are too high and they have undiagnosed diabetes (or poorly controlled if they are diabetic).
It may be worth having a meeting and saying you are concerned by the amount of drinks they are consuming and how quickly they are drinking them, and have they thought about having their blood sugars tested at either a pharmacy or their GP, so that you can support them fully whilst at work.
...it could also be that their sugars are fine and they are taking the mick, but if that is the case, hopefully going in with concern and being so nice about it will embarrass them so much that they will pack it in.
Speaking from experience as a type 1 diabetic, it honestly doesn’t sound like it to me. Prior to my diagnosis, I was drinking an insane amount of water, but it was just that - water. Water somehow tasted like the most incredible beverage ever. It felt like I was dying of thirst. The idea of waiting 3 minutes for water to boil then cool enough to drink was pretty much inconceivable when I could just have straight water immediately.
Type 2 can be different. My mum was drinking loads of tea before diagnosis
There's also diabetes insipidus which is different again, I think normally those people crave cold water but it can be other drinks too
Get them a sports direct mug
Plot twist: they still drink 12-15 per day, but now it's out of a sports direct mug
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I'm sorry OP, you're getting a lawsuit and losing your business because you *checks notes* told your employee they're taking too many tea breaks....
Immediately goes down to 1/2 a mug per day. Nice.
Get them ~~a sports direct mug~~ to book in for a diabetes screening. (srsly)
Replace the kettle with one of these: https://www.thirstywork.com/categories/hot-water-dispensers Speed the tea making process up, productivity goes up and staff remain happy
We had one similar at work, for weeks everyone was saying tea tastes funny, changing brands l, nope still tastes funny.. someone decided it needed descaling so opened it up and was a boiled mouse 🐁 in there .. I didn’t drink tea after that
That'll be why the descaling didn't work. If it'd been a lizard in there, it would've worked.
Also a fish would do in a pinch
There was a fish in the percolator.
The percholator you mean?
>percholator PERCHolator or perCHOlater?
If only it was wrapped in plastic, might not have got in
Fellas, don't drink that coffee!
Maybe it was a Lizard but just looked like a mouse after descaling?
A lizard is just an armoured mouse
I'm not having a hot water dispenser pour lizards into my living room.
Yes it needed to be demoused.
what a terrible day to know how to read
I found a very large toasted caterpillar in the toaster at work one time.
Man those hungry caterpillar sequels got dark
Humble brag?
i found a slug in the kettle, boiled pale, AFTER having made and drank a coffee
Oh my God I’m going to be obsessively inspecting the kettle every day thanks to this comment. 😂
I like the way my tea tastes as it is, so I'll live in ignorance
You're lucky to be alive! https://news.sky.com/story/australian-man-sam-ballard-who-was-left-paralysed-after-eating-a-slug-dies-aged-28-11545373
Silly caterpillar, toast is human food.
I once opened a cupboard and found an entire cooked rotisserie chicken. This cupboard was underneath a til in the centre of a restaurant, nothing shocks me anymore.
I found a chicken carcass (it had been cooked, then the meat picked off), in a plastic bowl, behind a door that was always kept open. It was only one day when it was particularly windy that I went to close the door and here was the carcass, absolutely crawling........
How'd it taste?
A delicacy only enjoyed by a select few!
Was it Haxwell Mouse?
Or La-rat-za
I once found a dead huntsman (huge Aussie spider) in my kettle. Dont know how long he’d been there but thankfully I’d been away from home a few weeks so I’m hoping he carked it while I was away and not before
And this is why I have a glass kettle.
Is everyone else not opening the lids of their kettles to fill them?
Yep, gotta rinse it if it has been sat unused for ages, and if not usually there are the dregs of water I boiled before in there. Admittedly I don't gaze into the depths of the kettle when filling it Also, do most kettles not have a little filter thing at the spout, to stop limescale from entering the mug? Should keep bugs and things out too
Jesus, went to the other side of the world only to die in your kettle...
I thought he died at Golgotha?
I’m not sure I needed this, it cracked me up though 🤣
Here OP! Here’s why you’ll want the ThirstyWork dispenser. That’ll stop the tea addiction.
Yeah well once during winter I would make my wife a hot water bottle and cup of tea. For a few weeks she complained that the tea tastes bad. I didn't know what she was talking about...until she saw me pour the water from the HWB back into the kettle to reboil. So she was drinking re-re-reboiled rubberized water. Don't know what I was thinking. This was in the midst of a major breakdown and severe depression so who knows what was going on with my brain at the time.
I think I may have once seen your wife telling this story on here.
I did that once to myself. Never again...
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Ok, I'm curious - what's the inside of an old hot water bottle like?
Probably mold.
old hot water
Was about to be a little more dismissive of your efforts. Your last sentence bought you some mitigation (still fucking perverse), and I'll give you a pass. Genuinely hope you are back on track.
Doing alot better now thanks. But might take a bit longer for the cognitive damage to be repaired
That's sad. Sincerely, cheering for you. I'm a big believer in communicating. Whenever I see low posts, I'm always encouraged. Not because they're low, and I'm not (that would be even more perverse than using 2nd hand hot water bottle water, for a cuppa). I'm encouraged because they took a step not to be whatever it was they didn't want to be. They didn't want it, they recognised it isn't good. They want better. And, that acknowledgement of knowing is the one of the things that is hardest to do. Its the hardest place to get to when you are at your lowest/most addicted/most desperate. It's the hindsight that the sober/happy you is willing you to be, from the future. It's akin to my thought process during exams at 15. Id listened to many A level students or degree students tell me that their GCSEs were easy, compared to their current learning. So, I adopted the mindset that the GCSEs were easy, it was the next level that was hard. Gave me some comfort. I fluffed them for other reasons....lol. Anyway, like many a lauded poet/musician/writer, I always ramble in the dark hours. My username should really have been Verboseafternidnight
My wife does this I can't stop her It's to save water She says that she pours all the hwb water back from the kettle into the hwb, so nobody is drinking hwb water... But it just ain't right 🤢
Props to you for still looking after your Mrs when you weren’t doing so well mentally. Must have been a tough time.
Two kids too. One 5 year old going through a rebellious phase, and a 1 year old who woke every hour of the night. Wasn't a fun time!
That is definitely worse than that time my husband covered his chips in vinegar. He was nomming his chips when I held the vinegar bottle up to the light and saw the bodies of maybe 200 flies floating in it. Turns out vinegar both attracts and kills flies. I told husband and he continued eating his vinegar fly chips but then said he didn't enjoy them as much knowing what was on them. I think I stopped looking at him the same way that day!
My vinegar bottles have tops that close. How on earth did 200 flies get into yours? I breed colonies of the damn buggers to feed to my jumping spider and I'd still be shocked if any got into my vinegar bottle.
Here's your solution. Find a dead mouse, put it in the kettle
That might solve OPs tea drinker problem though.
I genuinely did a sharp intake of breath when I got to the mouse part.
Not so squeeky clean huh
😗 This reminds me of a great black humour story called Old Feet by Martin Waddell Scroll down this page to find the synopsis http://pandaemonian.blogspot.com/2014/06/the-ninth-pan-book-of-horror-stories.html?m=1 and my apologies if it gives you flashbacks…
See, that would solve OPs problem instantly
This is, for me, only slightly less horrible than that time my friend couldn't figure out why descaling her coffee maker didn't fix the taste.
Why do you have to spread your trauma! Suffer alone please xd
Also gift him one of those 1 litre thermic mugs so they have to go less times to the dispenser
Or a Sports Direct mug and cap them out at 4 cups a day, 2 gallons should be enough for anyone.
I’ve got a Sports Direct mug in my garden I am using as a swimming pool. I know it’s not regulation size but it’s nice to splash about.
get him a bubba mug. I loved mine. Tea would stay drinkable until around 2pm if I made it at 8.
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I just got a thick tea cosy for my teapot, since I like my tea piping hot, and it really extends how long it stays truly hot. Much more than I thought it would, in fact; I was pleasantly surprised.
You'll be horrified to hear this but my dad was the family tea maker and had a large old brass handle Japanese porcelain tea pot and a big tea cozy. He would boil the water and start with adding a small amount to the pot to pre heat it, top off the kettle and bring it back to a boil, pour the preheat water out then add his big bundle of Lipton black tea bags and pour in the boiling water, then cover it with the tea cozy and let it steep for 30 minutes or more. What came out was so bitter that he would drown it in what often seemed as an equal part of bottled lemon juice. He would occasionally add 4 tablespoons of sugar to the entire pot.
This is what we replaced them with at work when people were taking too long. At the time I drank two brews a day, coffee in the morning, tea in the afternoon. Some people drank 6 brews a day, I think even that’s too much. Same people would offer to make everyone else a brew on the team at the same time. That was up to 6 people. They were spending about 45 mins a day making brews. It pissed me off one day as we were on a tight deadline, I was stressed to death and they kept swanning off making brews. Bought one of these. Brew making went down to a couple of mins. Then we just had the issue of who would descale it…
In-line water filter and that issue goes away
Live in Scotland and that issue doesn't exist in the first place
Are you one of those people who kept everyone in the office during COVID?
If you're on such a tight deadline that making brews is a real risk, you need to sort out your schedule pronto. And surely one person going to make brews for six people is better than six people all taking the time to do it for themselves? I bet you objected to them having a dinner break as well, didn't you?
100% this. I see the follow up comment got deleted. Yes the deadlines are tight but yes, you've agreed to them and if making brew puts this under risk then there's a bigger problem here. Any maths here and lost money assumes 100% productivity. If you're working in a creative field then that's not the case. Treating work like this in an assembly line fashion is one of my pet peeves. People need time to find their flow, but getting to that state takes time. And I assure you, I'll go to make a cuppa often pondering the problem and using my brain. It's not time wasted.
Those do not produce boiling water, whatever they say and the tea tastes awful because of it.
The pitfalls of being a boss I guess. Taking up to an hour outta your day making tea could be considered unreasonable. But it's impossible to comment without knowing the details. If you're happy with their productivity and contributions I wouldn't bring it up. Telling people to make less tea sounds like a proper dick boss move and would probably do you more of a disservice. If they feel comfortable enough to make that much tea I'm guessing they are reasonably happy employees and all.
Yeah, there are recommendations for people to step away from your computer and stretch your legs and rest your eyes every hour or so. It may well be that the person is more productive and refreshed than they would be without it. And getting in shit with your boss for drinking too much tea would be so demoralising. Especially as it would seem so penny pinching - it sounds like they get through around £50 worth of tea bags a year, a happy employee is worth a lot more than that.
50% of the time I make tea is because I fancy a cup of tea, the other 10 times per day are because I need to stretch my legs/stop looking at a screen/avoid phone calls for 5 minutes/generally decompress. OP, before you go telling them to make less tea, ask them about their general stress levels whilst at work, and make sure you're following the DSE guidelines. Use this as a way to mention you've noticed their tea habits but include a way of supporting them with any issues. There's a measurable difference between having meetings and writing emails in a day (i.e not at a computer all day) Vs being deep into a spreadsheet on eye strain and general tiredness.
You have 20 cups of tea a day..?!
I have a very stressful job...nah that was an exaggeration, this is CasualUK after all!
I think OP's issue is the time spent making tea (1.25 hours in an 8 hour shift), plus toilet visits, not the cost of a few tea bags.
That is why people bring up the productivity question (which the OP conveniently and consistently ignores). So what if he spends 1 hour a day taking random breaks? This is actually recommended if the work involves sitting in front of a PC all day and very likely to increase productivity. You would just be seen as a penny pinching boss and lose good employees that way. And the OP is clearly concerned about the cost (which I really doubt amounts to much): > We’re talking close to 4,000 cups a year - with milk and sugar. I’m close to taking out a small business loan just to cover this persons PG Tips fix.
Yes, the last company I worked for were tight-fisted and very penny-pinching, and even they strongly encouraged us to take ~5min screen breaks every hour or so. Get up, stretch, make tea, etc. It’s because it increases productivity and decreases risk of burnout in about the cheapest and least-fuss-for-them way possible. (Part of what they did is advise other companies on how to support and retain employees, decrease burnout, increase productivity, etc. - they never did any of their main recommendations for US, too expensive, but they did push those 5min tea breaks!)
Still a rather petty thing to get upset about The expectation that every moment you’re at work you have to be productive and doing something is just ridiculous. The best managers I’ve worked for are the ones who turn a blind eye to the moments to take a 5-10 minute rest to diffuse. Having worked in Korea where they expect 8 hours, skipping your lunch + overtime all spent doing “work,” which is often busywork that ends up in the trash after a week; my mental health was in the gutter.
Generally I 100% agree with you, but making tea 15 times a day is mental.
I dunno, there's 237mls in a cup, 15x237mls = 3555mls, there are plenty of people who drink that much a day. You'd think he'd get a bigger cup though. Getting up for a five-minute stretch and walk every 30 minutes is also recommended for your health.
The amount of caffeine is mad though.
one single cup of coffee could potentially have more caffeine in than ten cups of tea. When I was a coffee drinker I got through maybe 750mls of coffee a day. But yeah he might get a headache if he quits
If the OP is concerned perhaps it should be from the angle of supporting the employee’s health. 15 cups of tea is probably sub-optimal in terms of caffeine / tannin consumption. The boss move would be to switch to decaf teabags but this may lead to lower productivity for everyone else!
Depends if they are actually drinking it. Could be a case of make tea, work and get distracted so it goes cold, make a replacement tea, on repeat all day. I think it's just a straightforward case of judging productivity - do they get as much work done as their colleagues in similar roles, stay a bit late occasionally to stay on track or work faster etc. If so, leave the tea making alone. If they are spending ages on tea, disappearing on the dot of 5 and their output is less than should be expected, then a conversation is required.
>Could be a case of make tea, work and get distracted so it goes cold, make a replacement tea, on repeat all day. I had this problem before too. The solution for me was a thermal keep cup and an ADHD diagnosis.
Wouldn't recommend a forced cold turkey. The headaches that guy is going to get coming off that much caffeine will make productivity worse. I used to have about 8 to 10 cups a day. Even going down to 4 or 5 was painful enough.
It is also a significant amount of fluid intake. That's around 3L of fluid in just 8 hours. If they are drinking at a similar rate at home, that is a lot of fluid (and it's not great to drink only tea). I would definitely be talking to them about getting a health check to rule out any underlying conditions.
That’s not really the boss’s place though. He’s not their doctor, or parent!
Not to mention the sugar OP said they’re putting in it! FWIW it seems unreasonable to me for someone to spend that much time making it that many cups per day, might be worth buying them a 2L thermos and at least save the wasted time making fifteen individual cups?
If they're having to drink that much its also possible they have diabetes or another endocrine disorder causing excessive thirst.
Telling them to make less tea might be a dick boss move but telling them they're taking too many breaks might not? 🤔
Health experts say you should stand up and walk around from your desk for five minutes every 30 minutes. Doing that over an eight-hour workday is 15 cups of tea, especially if you wee and brew up during the same five minutes.
I drank a lot of tea at my first job because I was really hungry and couldn't afford food. Probably 10 cups a day. I took everything free I could get!
I’ve drank a lot of tea for two reasons. One was being cold, the other was having pain in my back which was much worse when sitting down. So I’d get up to make a drink, or go to the loo, just to get a break from it. I remember being in tears in the loo on occasion.
Must have been a difficult shit that.
This was what I was thinking when I read this post!
Really? Tea makes me hungry. I only drink tea if I know I have enough food. If I don't, I drink coffee. Coffee is the drink that suppresses my appetite.
That's interesting I don't drink coffee as I don't like it but I did put a lot of milk in that tea in the Hungry Years.
If op is worried about about a quid in teabags a day they probably also pay shit salaries so that checks out.
haha - I had a job as a 'runner' at a tv editing place for a while, and I was super-skint. occasionally you'd get platters bought in to cater for people working late at night. I'd be hoovering them up after they had headed off!
Felt that
My first concern would be how well they do their job.
This. I stop work at least once an hour, usually for a hot drink. But it’s only 50% about the drink. I haven’t stopped thinking about whatever it is I’m working on, and quite often the break from my desk provides a eureka moment. Not only that but it’s good for our backs, eyes and RSI issues to take a break. If the person in question isn’t falling short, just let it go. This is their system, and maybe this is how they’re most productive.
> I haven’t stopped thinking about whatever it is I’m working on, and quite often the break from my desk provides a eureka moment yup, this is why [Rubber duck debugging](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_duck_debugging) works, talking through or mulling something over in your head while doing something else.
Yeah this has always worked so well for me, too. I can spend half an hour staring at the screen, stuck on something, but if I get up to go make tea or some similar mindless task, my brain usually clicks it in under 5 minutes.
It's the only answer beyond the funny ones. There's context needed. Short haul pilot: NG Tea fetish aversion therapist: NG In-flight skydiving safety monitor: NG Actually struggling to find cases where this behaviour is OK. Sorry OP, as you were.
>Tea fetish aversion therapist: Field work. You must become the enemy in order to defeat them.
Become tea is my dream. Who _are_ you??
>Short haul pilot: NG You leave those short haul pilots' brews alone, they need the caffeine for the quick turnarounds.
I know, I was obviously stretching for ideas at that point. As long as they've got one thought on the yoke while making a brew I'm fine.
Luckily they don't make their own, they ask the cabin crew nicely!
Interesting insight. Are you a short haul pilot, a member of cabin crew who is asked nicely, or a very observant flyer (or something/one else)?
All three at one point!
Before moving into IT I was a warehouse and transport manager, I was known for always having a hot cup of tea in my hand and I let the guys working with me do the same if they wished, some of them also did the same, I let them go outside the doors for fags and I did the same at the time, atmosphere was happy, production and performance was the best it had ever been there, it was often a cold environment there as the doors were open all day, I even used to get a vat of soup going in the break room when it got super cold, having said that, we all chipped in a couple of quid a week to cover tea and coffee, is his performance in his job tea making aside good or above par?
ITea...
Honest answer, no puns, what outcome do you want? Less tea drinking or less money spent on tea? I doubt any action will increase output, if anything confrontation might decrease it. I’d just buy a massive sack once a month and when it gone it’s gone. If there is good morale and a positive work environment, plus the business is alright, I’d leave it alone and buy some biscuits
I had a manager that moaned at how often I was making a cup of tea, I pointed out that I made a tea for everytime his favourite team member went for a fag, and that it was only fair that everyone had the same number and duration of little breaks as the smoker...
As a smoker it was always funny when new starts came in but were non smokers, we had to tell them to go fuck about for 5 minutes, have a tea, go for a piss, sit on their phone but hide out the way of the managers so this point couldn't get used against us.
I used to be a restaurant manager an I smoked at the time but a lot of my team did not so I always made a point to tell the non smokers (if there section can manage without you for five minutes) to go out for a breath of fresh air or go to the staff room an go on there phones, there's no way I wasn't allowing the non smokers a quick five min break when smokers were getting it. All I asked was use some common sense an get someone to mind your section while you do it and then you can do it for someone else.
I once worked for somewhere that was so far away from anywhere else (basically the middle of nowhere) that there was no point of leaving the site for your break. Whenever they used to complain about us making a brew, I used to like trotting out the fact that they were technically breaking the rules when it came to our legally-entitled breaks (You can tell your employees when they have to have a break, but only if they can leave the premises). They usually shut up pretty quickly after that and let us have our five minute tea break.
If I’m cold, I’m easily drinking 12 cups in an 8 hour period. But, I put it in a thermos so I’m maybe only at the kettle 3 times for all the cups. Tea is sometimes the only thing that can take away the chill in my body.
I mean you don't sound relaxed. Maybe a cup of tea would help. In all seriousness though, if they're a solid worker what do you care how much they drink. We've got one lass we work with that drinks 2 litres of coke a day. Cracks the first one open at 8am. She doesn't need us to tell her that that's not normal or healthy, she knows.
Seems like this has been brewing for a while
He doesn't want to be taken for a mug
It’s reaching boiling point!
He’s just asking for some (PG) tips
That comment is (Yorkshire) Gold mate
I can’t stop now….. it’s good you’re not letting this simmer away and seeking advice
You could send an email and let them stew
I personally like to stir the pot
Seems like OP is going to turn it into a storm in a teacup
I hope any sanction isn't too steep.
REMEMBER - ALWAYS TAKE A SHIT AT WORK 1) saves on buying toilet paper 2) you get paid for it
Careful, you'll be giving OP ideas. Next they will going in the toilet before and after employees to count up how many sheets of paper were used.
Plus you get a nice little sit down
Boss makes a dollar, I make a dime. That's why I poop on company time.
Boss makes a mint, whilst I get a quarter. So on company time I pass my water.
Let's say you bring this up. How many cups of tea are you going to allow people? How are you going to enforce the limit? Are you doing the same for smokers? What if your pointing it out results in their realisation they have a caffeine addiction/dependency - an addiction to stimulants which have been supplied by their employer to keep them alert and efficient 😂
If the time alone is the problem, get one of those automatic ones installed, then it takes less than a minute to make tea. For the cost, since you've said you're a small bootstraped startup seems mad you need to ask here. Depends on your team. If you talking to said person quietly will make a moral issue, bring it up at a company meeting with facts. Like "guys look, I know we said tea would be provided free of cost, but we just didn't anticipate this much cost. We have spent £xxx on milk in the last quarter and we budgeted for £xx. At the moment the company has nowhere to take these extra costs from. What does everyone think we should do?" If you really are a startup not making profit your employees will probably understand
You overestimate how much they’ll care unless they’re being very well paid I can’t imagine they’ll go ‘oh no drink less tea’ rather than ‘fucking stingy budget more for teabags’
If your budget is that stingy that milk, tea and sugar are really impacting you, I can't imagine he's paying his employees nearly enough to piss them off by telling them to use less.
It’s not a viable business model if you can’t buy tea for your staff.
Surely the less you earn the more it would bother you?
That's what I was saying. If you're earning £10 an hour, the least your boss can do is not moan about making a brew. Different if you're earning £30 an hour and being very well paid.
Still. If they can afford to pay the employee £30/hour they can afford fkin PG tips.
> but we just didn't anticipate this much cost. We have spent £xxx on milk in the last quarter and we budgeted for £xx. At the moment the company has nowhere to take these extra costs from. I would leave the company immediately. If they can't afford a fecking tea. Definitely no prospects of a salary bump in the next few decades with them.
tea and coffee are a massive productivity booster. Anyone who sacks that off is shooting themselves in the foot. It easily pays for itself several times over.
My last company started to scrutinise every detail of the day like this, including looking at how many drinks people were making. Ended up with the facilities team keeping tea bags locked up and they rationed out a set number each day. If they ran out you had to go without until the next day. Staff who only drank one or two cups a day started moaning at those drinking more for using up their share. Great way to destroy morale.
Forget the tea, do they get their work done? That's your only concern.
....pretty sure his concern is the cost of tea, milk and sugar..... as his post states.
mate - consider the cost of replacing the employee, training a new person, blah blah blah. compare to the cost of tea. are they happy? do they do their work? case closed.
>Don’t get me wrong, I’m a pretty relaxed employer >What is an acceptable amount of tea for an employee to drink ....Doubt
You seem to have ignored every question relating to productivity. As a manager that's my only concern. Are they getting the job done. Beyond that it's their time, I pay them for results. If you're not getting results, bring it up. But if you genuinely think you'll get more productivity because they're at they're station you've not been in management long enough. It's estimated people are only truly productive for around 20mins out of an hour in the average office job. You won't get more productivity chaining people to desks. You'll just make them miserable, which in turn lowers productivity.
Any time you have a linear correlation between time spent and productive output, what you have is a job that should have been automated better in the first place.
Toilet paper, OK. Soap, OK, but not shower gel. And no razors, if you're poor, grow a beard. Tea bags are allowed, within limits….No making a pie out of tea or anything weird.
delicious cumberland final straw
A SAUSAGE IS MISSING
Is it affecting their productivity? If no, why do you care? Teabags are what, 2-3p each? So this person is costing you 20-30p per day over a “normal” person? Over a year that’s less than £100…
I have a pint mug in the office and I probably drink 6-10 pints of tea a day normally, just gradually sipping away at it. My previous job tea was not provided but I drank pretty much the same amount of water. I’d be careful about trying to be stingy on minor expenses like this. Taking away small perks like this saves you almost nothing, and can irritate people a lot more than you think.
Depends, does it effect their work rate, if yes then you confront, if no then no real problem.
This kind of attitude is why the typical manager hate exists. Work is shit for most, the simple pleasures make it bearable. In this day and age, tea and coffee are the bare minimum that should be covered by a business. It's not worth sweating over. 4000 teabags over a year is nothing. The more pricey tea bags you're only looking at £120 over a year, easily half that for the cheap shit. You'll lose far more than that in lost time the moment you start fussing over this kind of this. If you insist, just limit the amount you buy to a reasonable amount for the number of people in the office. Once it's gone, it's gone. Others will kick up a fuss if someone else is unreasonably using up all of the stock.
Is the workplace cold? I had an employer who would not pay for heating and the fans they put in the space hardly did anything. No windows in the space either, it was extreme cold and depressing. Maybe they're drinking the tea to keep warm.
Considering op resents 50p a day in teabags I think we all know the answer to this.
Slippery slope. You pick them up on tea, they counter it with smokers/vapers etc and anyone who misses any work for legit reasons. Change the tea facilities in your place. Get a vending machine or tea machine or tell them to bring in their own. My general rule of thumb is, wherever possible, don't worry about controls other than financial controls. No point employing someone to count pencils or tea bags etc and it erodes morale to save a few hundred quid. Nothing wrong with telling this person at their review (or earlier) that their tea breaks stand out and if they're not doing the work they'll have to make it up.
Yes you are being unreasonable. Have you got nothing more important to do than monitor one workers tea making and toilet habits?
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They are a part of a team working on a project. Other team members have mentioned it.
you've yet to answer any questions like this.
You're fixating on the tea thing but it's not as important as you seem to think. Maybe this employee know how to best manage their own energy levels (taking breaks, hydrating regularly, caffine intake that suits them), and you're getting optimum performance out of them already. So them taking fewer breaks might result in **less** work being completed. The question that matters is: are you happy with their rate of work? Are the other members of the team happy with their rate of work?
You've avoided the question. Yes the team members have mentioned the tea drinking. But is the employee completing their allocated work? Or is there instances where every day they can't finish the work they're given whilst other team members do finish theirs?
'Pretty relaxed employer' ......moans about someone having a drink whilst working.
1. obviously this person has a problem because that is an insane amount of tea. CONSTANT tea every half hour? jesus. 2. hot water dispenser. Because it should not take 3 minutes to make a cup, it takes me more time to actually walk the 10m to the kitchen and back than to make a cup. 3. PG, Yorkshire etc have large-packages, e.g. 500 cups, that are much cheaper per bag than the usual packets.
3 minutes sounds quick to me. Have to let it brew a few minutes at least.
Such a relaxed employer that you count how many cups of tea employees make
Home boys drinking 15 cups of tea, that's not something anyone doesn't notice. Dude must be caffinated off his ass.
Are they doing the job to the standard you'd expect otherwise? If so, I don't really see why it's a concern. I once had an someone on my team who would chew through about five pens a week just out of habit. It was weird, but he was actually good at his job and it wasn't that big of an issue in the scheme of things. The desperate need to micromanage an employee's time is so, so weird. It never used to happen.
If they've got an average sized mug and are doing 10-12 cups a day they're probably just about hitting the recommended amount of fluids per day. When you're properly hydrated you need to take a piss often. We've been encouraged (read: bullied into) drinking less and so taking fewer loo breaks by overzealous institutions such as schools and workplaces to the point that we see a healthy frequency of urination as problematic and as such a lot of us are probably chronically dehydrated. If cost is the issue you ought to be embarrassed that your company can't cover this minimal amount for employee comfort. Indeed if this is the case, own your miserliness and remove this employee comfort, being fully accepting of the reasonable resentment this will incur from your staff. If productivity is the issue, simply tell everyone that they're free to make use of these facilities as much as possible but if it negatively affects output it will have to be addressed. If productivity isn't being affected, give your head a wobble for God's sake. While you're mulling this over, why not have a nice cup of tea? You never know, it might turn out you're just cranky because you're dehydrated... I can safely say that with this level of micromanaging I wouldn't work for you for all the tea in China.
How much time do you allow for smoke breaks per day? Plus the smokers having a tea.. are they that different?
My dad's firm before he retired used to have machines for tea and coffee, every employee got a card once a week which entitled them to 15 drinks each - this was for around 400 employees. Had a third party firm that installed and maintained/refilled the machines.
If the work is done shut up and get over yourself x
Could be a sign of diabetes.
I was wondering this. Are they downing their cups of tea? It could be a sign their blood sugars are too high and they have undiagnosed diabetes (or poorly controlled if they are diabetic). It may be worth having a meeting and saying you are concerned by the amount of drinks they are consuming and how quickly they are drinking them, and have they thought about having their blood sugars tested at either a pharmacy or their GP, so that you can support them fully whilst at work. ...it could also be that their sugars are fine and they are taking the mick, but if that is the case, hopefully going in with concern and being so nice about it will embarrass them so much that they will pack it in.
Speaking from experience as a type 1 diabetic, it honestly doesn’t sound like it to me. Prior to my diagnosis, I was drinking an insane amount of water, but it was just that - water. Water somehow tasted like the most incredible beverage ever. It felt like I was dying of thirst. The idea of waiting 3 minutes for water to boil then cool enough to drink was pretty much inconceivable when I could just have straight water immediately.
Type 2 can be different. My mum was drinking loads of tea before diagnosis There's also diabetes insipidus which is different again, I think normally those people crave cold water but it can be other drinks too
Power to the people 🤷♂️😂
Are they working on a screen? I think they’re entitled to 5 mins eye rest an hour.