British academia runs on tea.
It’s true. I’d forgotten what it’s like to work in a scientific university environment in this green and pleasant land. The entire building seems to decamp to the tea room as a ritual occasion, once at mid-morning and again around three in the afternoon. A fair few can be seen lingering with an after-lunch cuppa as well, and the kettle in our study room is boiling pretty much constantly.
Thought facilitator or pesky distraction?
The tea culture is a steamy reflection of the underlying stretched-out time frame behind all the hard work going on. After a few years in a rather formal, nine-to-five, constrain-your-lunchbreak-to-an-hour-or-else office environment, the relaxed atmosphere of academia is a bit of a shock. Nobody cares what you wear; nobody cares what time you come in or leave. Nobody cares if you check your email or book a holiday or read the BBC website or nip out to the post office on ‘company time’. There is no company. There is only the organic whole of the laboratory, whose clock is individual and self-wound. People might be in the lab from ten until midnight, but the amount of actual lab work going on is nowhere near as long. There is time for reflection; time to chat with colleagues; time to sit in on the many seminars and group meetings going on. And time, of course, for another cup of tea.
After a month, I’m still not quite into the swing of it. If the Tube has problems and it starts looking as if I’ll arrive later than my (self-imposed) 9:30 target, my heart begins to race with anxiety: the phantom weight of corporate disapproval, bearing down on me. I still feel guilty taking the occasional peek at my personal email, and I can’t seem to get out of the habit of eating a sandwich at my desk while working at the computer instead of hanging out in the common room with the others, or skipping lunch altogether. I try to work hard and stay focused while I am there, and so far, with only a few exceptions, I’ve managed to leave eight or nine hours after I arrive. And no weekends. Even so, I think it’s entirely possible that I am getting as much done as everyone else.
Gone are the days of eighty-hour-a-week stints in the lab, for me. I’m at the age now when I realize that you can compress a lot of effort into a smaller amount of time, and what is important in life is to carve a space for yourself outside of work, to defend it rigorously, and to not let yourself be seduced by the siren call of “just one more quick experiment”. And just as importantly, I have learned not to care what other people might think when I am always the first to walk out the door.
Like tea, obsessive long-hours research is highly addictive. But I’m confident I can kick at least one of these habits.
Nice mug.
An interesting art project would be to get people to take a photo of their work mug and explain why they chose it. I’m sure there’s some psychology of work mug choice research just begging to be done too.
Or portraits of scientists with mugs of tea – that could be fun.
Your second-last paragraph is very powerful. And I think, helpful. I wonder whether the long hours culture of science attracts as many as it repels?
I know I’m talking with myself here, but I went back to the main page and there was a big notice for Connotea Nature’s bookmarking site.
Is that deliberately named I wonder? Connocoffee wouldn’t pull in the lab crowd?
{giggle} Scott, it reads as if you’ve been drinking one too many yourself.
I think there is something in the long nights appeal. I’ve stayed late, as I mentioned, only a few times over the past month, but there is a definite buzz when you find yourself riding that adrenalin rush of no food and no rest when everything is one big blur of purpose. You leave the building and explode out into the night like a bottle rocket. When I was young, I used to live for that high.
The only objection I have to tea is that in our department there’s multiple little milk-sharing consortiums that go halves on a pint of milk that lasts a week or so. Hence our fridge is absolutely rammed with tiny little bottles of milk, many of which are a bit passed their sell-by date. When I rule the universe I’d pay for a great big bottle of milk from departmental funds once a week. Should save at least a few hours a week from people nipping down the shop. Oh, and one of those boxes of 6,000 teabags you can get from Costco for a tenner. I’ve always been curious to know if that’s the right amount to make tea in a.) a cement mixer or b.) a swimming pool.
Tsk, where’s your maths, Paul?
One mug is about 200ml. So 6,000 teabags at one teabag per mug is 1200 litres of tea.
These small cement mixers have a capacity of 90 litres.
These concrete mixer trucks have a capacity of about 3500 litres.
This site shows that an Olympic pool is about 2,500,000 litres.
So one box of 6,000 teabags would do just over 13 cement mixers, one-third of a concrete mixer truck, or one-twentythousandth of an Olympic pool.
Not forgetting the extra teabag for the pot, mind…
good to see you can still wotd 😉
Omigod, I’m being stalked! What are you doing in here? 🙂
Scott, I think you’d need to scale up that ‘one for the pot’ as well. But by what factor?