opting out

Traditionally, if someone's going to get a drink from the drink-dispensing machine they'll take a wee cup-rack and ask their immediate desk-pod-colleagues if they would like anything. I tend to opt out of this much the same as I opt out of the rounds system in the pub and at licensed functions. Whilst there are sound medical and financial reasons for the latter I can't really explain the former except for the reason that I usually bring two flasks of proper coffee and a litre of water to my desk which usually last me the day. It's partly not wanting to waste time standing behind exceptionally slow people attempting to get the exeptionally slow machine to do things and partly because the taste is utterly foul, most especially on the coffee though I expect people who drink tea find the tea fairly foul too. The hot chocolate is fairly cheap and crap but is sometimes acceptable if one is feeling a little energy-depleted. Generally the drinks are crap and if I went to get a cup of water every time I wanted one I'd never get anything done so the nice-tasting flask-coffee and bottle-of-water-in-insulated-sleeve-thing works quite well, especially now that the cold water option on the big machines has been inactivated and anyone wanting cold water has to use the tepid crap dispensed by a smaller and crapper Borg & Overström water-only thing which is only cold if it's had a good twenty-minute uninterrupted run-up after which it can dispense about two cups of chilled-ish water beforegoing tepid again. The hot water isn't really hot enough to be able to get the most out of a nettle teabag either and in much the same way that we don't have openable windows we are also denied simple yet effective tools such as a tap and kettle in our building which which people might simply and easily make nice-tasting drinks or retrieve simple ground-chilled fresh water with a minimum of fuss and with a lot less plastic cup wastage.