A Thesis On Leaking Paper Cups
Day after day. Complaint after complaint. When my oral request to the management to change the leaking paper cups for tea did not change, I wrote the following 'thesis' about it on the organization's internal blog igniting a debate around it!
A Thesis On Leaking Paper Cups
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Given each stack of paper cups for tea/coffee has about 40 cups each. And approximately 10 stacks are kept on the 4th floor. That amounts to 400 cups of tea/coffee everyday. Assuming only 100 cups are consumed. (It is FY end and everyone has Targets to meet. So the numbers for March might completely hitting a new high! It is actually interesting - that we could study the tea/coffee drinking patters to derive an implication on behaviors and habits.)
Now we are a four floor building. Meaning 100*4=400 cups everyday. Let us be generous in our assumption (yes I have a mighty heart) and consider only 300 cups are consumed everyday. If you are wondering where am I getting at, just hold on to me for another moment please - you will understand. (By the way, technically, a 'moment' is 90 seconds long. Patience.)
It so happens that after an hour at my desk, I always go to the corner table with the tea/coffee labelled mugs, to enjoy a cup of tea (and wonder how am I going to cut down on the Order Intake delays.) And in the past two weeks I have had 7/10 days where the cup was leaking. So either I gulp it down real quick and burn my tongue or perhaps take out another cup. I tell the support staff they must change the cups and they nod like they always do. Nothing came out of my suggestions on three different occasions.
Back to statistics: Of 300 cups consumed each day, by probability of 7/10 time leaks, that is 70% chance of leaking each time you fill a cup. Considering if only one-third of people with leaking cups took out another cup to hold on to the spilling beverage, we have an extra usage of 70 cups everyday. That implies 300+70 = 370 cups everyday.
If there are 22 working days in a month, we have 70*22=1540 extra cups used monthly. In a year's time, we would have used 18,480 extra cups just coz someone did not fix the leaking cups!
In a nutshell:Dearest Facilities Team, the paper cups are leaking. Please fix them.
(And he gulped down his tea and burnt his tongue. Not a happy ending after all :P)