useless information

[treeturner123]

Not sure if I have posted this anecdote before, but...

An engineer in one firm I worked for had a Dulux Colour Chart showing the colour he wanted his tea and the colour for his coffee!!

As far a I was concerned, when it was my turn, he got what he was given!

Phil

 

[sammy.se]

Not sure if I have posted this anecdote before, but...

An engineer in one firm I worked for had a Dulux Colour Chart showing the colour he wanted his tea and the colour for his coffee!!

As far a I was concerned, when it was my turn, he got what he was given!

Phil

Genius. I think I need to get myself some colour cards!

Wanting my tea 'the colour of he-man' is lost on the young uns in my house.

Sent from my SM-G973F using Tapatalk

 

[Nelsun]

Not sure if I have posted this anecdote before, but...

An engineer in one firm I worked for had a Dulux Colour Chart showing the colour he wanted his tea and the colour for his coffee!!

As far a I was concerned, when it was my turn, he got what he was given!

Phil

The temptation to buy the corresponding paint one day and put it in his mug...

 

[Racers]

One April the first we swapped the coffee in the machine for gravy powder, mmm sweet milky gravy...

Pete

 

[novocaine]

We swapped the decaf and the real stuff round. Lasted about a month. Got em both ways.

 

[Phil Pascoe]

One thing I always remember from that site was we only had ten minutes for tea, so you took the opportunity to gain a few minutes if it came your way. One of these times was when the foreman wanted something picked up from the shop. He called my friend Duncan in one morning and asked if was going to the shop (which was near enough on site). Yes, said Duncan. Well go a few minutes early and get me 20 Embassy while you're there. What if they haven't got any Embassy? Oh, anything else'll do. Duncan duly comes back with a brown paper bag and drops it on the desk. What's that? A steak and kidney pie - they didn't have any Embassy. :lol:

 

[treeturner123]

Love the April 1st one Pete.

I also remember having to go to a meeting at some consultants. 'Come about 9.30' said my contact, so I did.

'Why 9.30' I asked when I got there and was given a cup of machine coffee. 'Well, the machine gives free coffee till 9.30, then we have to pay for it till 1.00pm for an hour, then we have to pay till 4.00pm after which it is free. Mind you most of us' he said smiling, 'have cottoned on and we get several cups before 9.30, then microwave them till 1.00pm'.

It only goes to prove that mans ingenuity knows no bounds!!!!

Phil

 

[Andy Kev.]

Having read through the info, I can see why the tea at the office tastes so bad. Water comes from one of those infernal 'Boiler Taps' at about 85C NOT 100C

Phil

As an aside, never ever order a cup of tea in a German cafe as the experience is enough to make you weep. They bring out a cup of hot water which was quite possibly nowhere near boiling to start with and God knows what temperature it is by the time it reaches the table. Next to the cup lies the tea bag which is often presented in some sort of weird packaging. The packaging usually advises a brew time of 3 -5 minutes. :shock:

Milk is often an afterthought and minimally provided in those horrible little sealed plastic pots and its all too often the thick stuff that is quite suitable for coffee but a disaster for tea.

As far as I can make out, the reason for this is that the Germans quite like fruit teas and the above directions make sense for them. (If you think of them as "herbal infusions" and banish from your mind the insult to the word "tea" which they represent, they can be OK, especially on a cold winter's day.)

It is therefore no surprise that the Germans don't drink much tea. I've lost count of the number of times when they express delight when presented with a cup of proper English tea made the correct way with boiling water and proper English tea bags. I sometimes think that the Foreign Office should set up as part of its foreign aid programme a charitable foundation in Germany* and other countries which are clueless in the minor points of civilisation (essentially everywhere where Johnny Foreigner lives) in order to teach them the art of making a decent cup of tea. As things currently stand, the first place where you're in with a shout after India is Australia!

*The one noble exception is Friesland (or East Frisia if you will) where they have their own variation on tea which is acceptable. This however should be no great surprise as some of the Anglo-Saxons came from what is now Friesland.

 

[AES]

Not a +1 to the above post Andy Kev, just a "+100"!!!!!

Absolutely disgusting stuff in Germany.

I was in Germany with my boss from UK years ago and he wanted tea with his breakfast. I pleaded with him NOT to order it but he didn't believe me when I described what would happen if he did. Sure enough something just as you describe arrived at the table - a sort of orangey luke-warm liquid was the result after he had dunked the "tea bag" into his cup. He decided that I had been quite correct.

BTW, "tea" is often very similar here (Switzerland) - where, unlike Germany, which has fairly recently started serving reasonably acceptable stuff - only coffee is an acceptable drink when in hotels & restaurants.

Whenever I visit UK (rarely these days) I usually bring home at least one box of Brooke Bond PG Tips.

Visitors to Germany, "you have been warned" ;-)

 

[Andy Kev.]

AES,

don't they have British or English shops in Switzerland? I popped into the British shop in Stuttgart yesterday and stocked up on Yorkshire Gold tea. (I also got Christmas pudding, brandy butter etc. because I've been stiffed with organising the Christmas raffle for the local Anglo-German club.) I would imagine that if you did a quick google, you would find an oasis of civilisation in one of the bigger cities.

Edit: There's Jim's British Shop which has branches in a place with the unlikely name of Gland and in Glenis and his website shows quite a few kinds of tea.

 

[Droogs]

For AES, the english language bookshop in zurich has a little English shop in it and sells proper tea (I wouldn't have survived my time in Zurich otherwise).
On a side note, the way in which the British drink their tea is in no way British. In most of middle europe it is known as Bavarian style tea. We started drinking tea with milk and sugar because the Elector of Hannover did and we copied him when he became king of the brits.

There is a fascinating documentary about the history of tea and how important it was to the rise of the empire and the modern world. Without us being a nation of Darjeeling addicts, the empire would have been pretty feeble and the industrial revolution would have taken until around now to get started, all because we had to boil the water instead of just heating it up like for that coffee rubbish. change our ability to live in large cities, healthcare etc pretty amazing stuff really.

 

[AES]

Andy Kev,

Yup, there's a British Shop in Basel, only about 20 mins drive for us. We do go there sometimes, but the prices are absolutely HORRENDOUS (actually, in common with the price of most other things here - I really do believe that our Govt is actually proud of the fact that we're the "hochsten kost inseln ins Europ)!!!!

Nevertheless, we have recently stocked up on Mincemeat from there (for the coming mince pies season of course).

And at present we're OK for PG Tips and Branston Pickle (regular visitors from UK now know better than to arrive without, otherwise they get turned away on the doorstep)! Pity we can't get decent fish n chips here - but to be fair, the above list is just about all I miss from UK, and I think it would be pretty hard to import fish n chips anyway, so I make do with "Felchen im Bierteig". It's "kinda OK" with "Dampfkartoffeln".

Edit for P.S. to Droogs: Just seen your post. Yup, Bider & Tanner in Basel, an excellent bookshop for English (and many other) books, also have an "English Corner" with all sorts of tempting goodies. We do partake from time to time, but again, the prices would blow yer socks off!

But all in all, "we get by" and frankly, for me anyway, I feel far more "at home" here than I do on my now infrequent visits to UK - and that's even without considering the current UK "political situation"

 

[Vann]

...and proper English tea bags...

Tea bags ain't "proper" (hammer) .

Proper tea is made with loose tea in a pot. You put the milk in the cup first, otherwise some of those pesky tea leaves will float :wink: .

Cheers, Vann.

ps. I was taught to make "proper" tea by my much older BIL - an Englishman from Staines. He later changed to using tea bags. When I was asked to make tea I would tear open the tea bags (with as much ceremony as I could muster) and pour the leaves into his tea pot :twisted:

 

[AES]

Vann,

IF used "properly" (i.e. at least 3 placed inside a first-warmed brown china teapot, water poured over the lot immediately AFTER the kettle has clicked, then allowed to stand for AT LEAST 3 mins), teabags are great if they're the right brand (IMO).

Just for info, before we were married I bought my (Swiss) wife a proper brown china teapot - for the first birthday that arrived after I first knew her you understand! (One must make sure these foreign Johnies - and Johnieesses - are correctly educated you know).

 

[Garno]

When in the army I learnt a very important thing about tea.

If your spoon cannot stand upright then it is not tea.

Garno

 

[Suffolkboy]

You used to make it with mud?

Are you Baldrick?