A Cup of Tea, a Whiteboard, and a Better Idea

Sometimes the best ideas start with a cup of tea — and a marker in hand.

2025-10-15

A cup of tea has always been something sacred for us tech people.
Not coffee — coffee is about something else entirely.
Tea, exactly tea. Tea is a ritual.

Green, alpine, Ceylon, with mint, thyme, chamomile, or simply whatever’s in the office kitchen today.

Tea is almost meditation.
From brewing and steeping to that quiet moment when you just hold the cup in your hands.
(Who said “drink”? Ew. Drinking tea is vulgar.)

It’s the time to slow down, gather your thoughts, clear your head, chat with colleagues.
Oh, a cup of tea is multitasking and multidimensional.

Banning tea (work must be done without breaks™) — like banning any break — is pure evil, leading to something close to an Italian strike.

Once I worked at a company where nobody banned tea, but one day, whiteboards, markers, and magnets suddenly appeared at all the “tea spots.”

It took less than two weeks — and now I think it might have been even faster — for those corners of calm to turn into small laboratories.

People stood by the boards with cups in hand, arguing, hissing, erasing each other’s doodles, and drawing new ones.

You wouldn’t believe how many bugs were fixed there, how many ideas were born — and made it to production!

Only after that experience did I start noticing it in old black-and-white films — physicists, a chalkboard, a few cups.
At universities — the same board, the same chalk, the same warm discussion.

And you smile: you know that atmosphere, that energy, that thrill of thinking, that hum of a living mind.

Good job.
Make the complex simple.
And don’t forget to pour yourself some tea.