The Warwick Commission - TEAgate 2008

A good night in. Richard had invited Claire around for tea, Lee works nights so she often spends nights alone. Tonight showed that a lot of fun can be had without alcohol, we got merry on tea . . but not any old tea. . .

Richard told us about Kate (who works in his team) bringing up at their team meeting A.O.B her annoyance at the disappearance of her own personal milk from the fridge at work. No one was really interested at work, but this started a small discussion about ways around said problem, which then included testing of methods and even a written report for Kate fresh and waiting for her the next morning in her inbox.


THE WARWICK COMMISSION 2008: A study in Teagate

Commissioned by Kate

Carried out by Claire, Richard & Siobhan

THE PROBLEM

There has been an increase in lactose thefts from the first floor kitchen in recent weeks. Miss Kane has dominated meetings, which some of us have already lost interest in by the time they’ve started, with her continuous moaning about the effect of the thefts on her rigorous caffeine intake schedule. A method was requested to avoid the thefts.

THE PROCESS

Initial solutions were analysed :

1) Piss Milk

Technique: Piss in your milk.

PROS: Piss is free, no-one wants to drink piss (except Anita Roddick – C. Avery 2008) and the satisfaction factor is high, if you see the guilty party partaking of the lactose.

CONS: You might forget and drink your own piss, a funnel is required and you need to buy another milk for your own consumption, back to square one.

2) Salty Milk

Technique: Add several spoons of salt to your milk.

PROS: As above without the need for disrobing in University House.

CONS: You might inadvertently kill a colleague and although they deserve it as they are a thief even we don’t hate the International Office that much.

3) The ‘Other Container’ Solution

Technique: Decant your milk into an empty Coke or Gin bottle.

PROS: Colleagues would avoid as they wouldn’t be sure of what was contained within.

CONS: If using a Gin bottle, Dave Botterill would drink all your milk.


4) Traffic Light Milk

Technique: Add 5-6 drops of food colouring to your milk. Red, Green, Blue or Yellow, the choice is yours.

PROS: Funny coloured liquid in the fridge, people will avoid at all costs. Cheap solution, no taste, enhance your wacky persona by having ‘Green Tea’.

CONS: Slight chance that the fridge police will assume that your milk has gone very off. Suggest ‘not Green’ to avoid this assumption.

THE EXPERIMENTS

The testers decided to carry out scientific tests, photos were not take of option 1 for obvious reasons, this is a line a Manager should never cross with one of his minions.

Options 2 and 3 are a waste of Milk or Coke which for a 33% Yorkshire panel was not a t’thing to do.

Option 4 (see images below)



THE CONCLUSIONS

The testers found no discernable change in taste or smell and they got over the shock of drinking paint quite quickly.

Concerns were raised over knowing how much milk to add to your tea as the usual colour chart was rendered obsolete. Suggestions ranging from accurate guessing to mug lines for tea and traffic light milk need further investigation.

Report approved by Prof. A Guthrie.