A Trolley Good Time

The Tea Lady is virtually a mythical figure these days. Once an essential part of any medium sized business; the post is now reduced to a couple of stereotypes.

In my part of the world, they finally seem to have totally disappeared in the early 1990s, although the die was cast a couple of decades earlier.

I blame “Time and Motion Experts”. Remember those guys? They had a stopwatch and a calculator, and they stood behind people and worked out how much work they could pump out in a given time. Then workplaces such as factories could insist upon that work being completed.

I had a factory job on a muffler welding line when I was in my early 20s and every task had a number of seconds it was supposed to take. The reality was, when people got to the number of items they were supposed to have completed in a shift, they’d stop. Sometimes they’d go and help someone else who was behind in their work, mostly they’d hide outside in the yard with an iced coffee and a cigarette for an hour.

“Time and Motion” Experts have, over time, been shown up for the complete waste of resources they were. The standard version is a guy with a stopwatch, a calculator, a clipboard, an accounting degree and a complete lack of understanding of behavioral economics, who made stupid pronouncements, put in a large bill and then wandered off to cause misery and mayhem elsewhere.
And it was as business became entranced with these charlatans that the demise of the tea lady was complete.
There were other forces at work. The idea of a tea “lady” was bound to come up against notions of gender equality, and was unlikely to be a role that educated young women with the world at their feet would aspire to. Whereas previous generations of office workers could not leave their desks, the gradual phasing out of smoking in the workplace led to the extraordinary idea that nicotine junkies had the special status of being able to leave their workplace to indulge in their foul and anti-social habit every so often.

The ironic thing that underlies all of this is that tea ladies were mostly introduced during wartime to boost productivity.

Yes, it’s true. The theory being that if people who were working very hard on typical wartime pursuits such as moving information about, creating armaments or directing forces could be refreshed and energised with a nice hot cup of tea without leaving their station, more could be achieved.

And you know what- it worked.

Pretty obvious when you think about it. Slow release caffeine, topping up of bodily liquids, a sweet treat and a small bit of office gossip delivered in one hit. The perfect pick-me-up.

The same theory holds for a cup of coffee delivered in the same way, of course, except that coffee is not ideal as the caffeine is more of an instant hit and dissipates more quickly.

So, something that was introduced to boost productivity – and worked – eventually fell victim to various social forces including the just plain wrong assertion that removing it boosted productivity.

When I was working at a large company in the early 2000s, I simply took 15 minutes just before 11am and 3pm precisely and headed to the kitchen with my large teapot. As the hour struck, up to a dozen people from all over the building would drift in to share whatever tea I had bought along that day. Since a few of the people involved were quite senior, everyone assumed it was some sort of officially sanctioned activity. Eventually it lead to The Humorous Incident.

I’m a big fan of the meeting over a cuppa, and wherever I can, it’s something I indulge in. If you have to have a meeting, might as well have a teapot, I say.

It’s a fact, though, that many people in their workplaces cannot just pop out to meet a client or some other stakeholder over a brew as I like to. Many people cannot leave their station, whether it be the booth of a car park, the ninth cubicle in the second row on the left or a front counter.

I doubt there’s a better way to boost their morale, productivity and blood sugar than tea and a biscuit.

So, where to from here? Let’s be practical. How do workplaces bring back the tea lady?

It’s not via help-yourself methods such as vending machines or filthy teab*gs in the kitchen.

Vending machines in particular irk me, as they are full of corner shop type impulse buys – chocolate bars, potato chips, oat bars. The joy of a small biscuit or cake is often that they are not in your eyeline every time you buy a newspaper. And these machines dispense foul, substandard beverages. Powdered milk, or even worse, “non-dairy creamer”, which as I previously examined, is basically so wrong that it is used as an explosive and is not allowed to be sold as “creamer” in countries where it’s against the law to lie to your customers.

No! You can do so much better.

The first thing a workplace needs is a conveyance, be it trolley or tray, and a conveyor, which can well be someone who also has another task. Sadly, so few places have workplace cafeterias these days, which is an obvious place for a tea lady to work when not delivering tea.

We have to drop the “lady” as it is clearly not a gender-specific role. “Tea boy” is a well established alternative but just isn’t right. I myself was effectively the office tea lady for several years – and was called that – but we need a better term. So what to use?

Corporate speak would be “Beverage Requirement Facilitator” and I think we can safely say that’s a non-starter. We could borrow the word “sommelier” from wine, but I personally disapprove of using overblown winespeak – something I have opposed since Alexander Neckham’s remarks in 1240 or thereabouts, so that’s out.

“Trollista” is something I came up with, but rightly should be smacked about for. “Beverage Attendant” sounds wrong.

If you need to sell the idea to management, perhaps “Work Booster” is the best title.

Since I can’t actually come up with the perfect title, I’ll leave that for the comments.

But business needs to hear our clarion call. Do it now! Do it properly!

Teapots or large french presses or samovars or urns. Loose leaf tea. Biscuits (cookies) and/or small cakes. Sugar cubes. Proper milk. Drip filter coffee if you must.

Get your business trolleyed up and equipped to take on the world.

Bring back the tea lady. Give her a different title, lose the gender specification and add a flashing amber light if your Health and Safety requirements insist but bring “her” back!

There are so many workplace morale ideas that can now be implemented. Golden teacup of the day for outstanding effort. Special jam biscuit when it’s your birthday. Competitions to pick the week’s tea blend.

And when your company rises like a phoenix, slaying all it’s tealess competitors and becoming top of the heap, you’ll have the means on hand to enjoy a well-deserved celebratory tea.

And perhaps a really nice little cake.