Expert Opinion: Fancy a brew?

Each month John Davies, senior corporate partner at leading commercial law firm Thrings, casts an honest, humorous and at times, irreverent eye over a topical news or business-related issue. This month: the minefield of the office drinks round.

Where do I begin with this one? You work in a team. These are tough times at the coalface and what you really need is a cuppa to slake your corporate thirst. Once upon a time this was a fairly simple problem to overcome: two choices, tea or coffee, with the subsidiary choices of milk and sugar. If you wanted to go all ‘rocket science’, you could even drill down on the strength of the beverage, how may teaspoons of sugar the lucky recipient requires or dare I say it, ‘a sweetener’.

In these days of ever-increasing choice, however, it’s a logistical nightmare. Four little words and the Rubik’s Cube of office-based imbibing kicks in: “Anyone fancy a cuppa?” With this, the box – or should I say the teapot – is open.

“Yes please, I’ll have……”, and here it comes……“a skinny latte, a frappuccino, a mocca, a cappuccino, a decaf tea, a fruit tea, a ginger tea, a mint tea, a herbal essence, an Americano, a soup, a Bovril and my current favourite, a red bush”. A red bush no less!

But the pain doesn’t end there though, does it? As well as the endless choice of fluidic loveliness, we no longer have just simple milk and sugar to contend with. We have milks and sugars. As if the challenge of remembering this menagerie of liquid exotica isn’t enough, you now have to remember the blinking milk order.

You can chose red if you’re a goody two shoes, green if you’re a bit middle of the road, blue if you’re past caring and gold if you’re into extreme sports. Add to that the subtleties of cream, soya milk, goat juice, organic, evaporated and homogenised milks and the pressure is really on.

There is of course a cunning way around this minefield by using the dark and dying art of old school ‘office craft’.

Put simply, you offer to get the round in, and when things get complex, you overemphasise your confusion and get in early with advanced apologies for poor performance in the likely outcome of your brew duty. Someone will always come to the rescue and take a way the pain – either in sympathy, or in fear of being poisoned. Go on, grab yourself a biscuit and try it. Your world will never be the same again.