Caffeine,Cocaine and Coffee Talk

Coffee has always been my favorite drink, starting the day with a cup of coffee…I would have guzzled atleast a couple of rounds before dusk. Ever since the shepard who discovered arabicas some where in the deserts (was it brazil?) coffees popularity has reached far and wide...thanks to Star Bucks.

I don’t know whether it is the taste of coffee or the caffeine which keeps us going on and on. I remember when this little café coffee day outlet opened in our campus…it was kind of pseud to have a cup of branded coffee besides you on the desk. Before café coffee days advent we were accustomed to the more subtle tea in plastic cups tea from our coffee shop just around the corner of library or the mess. Here in Cincinnati especially within P&G premises I find innovative usage of coffee. Firstly coffee breaks can be used as an alibi to get out of your seat on slightest pretext. All you do is wait for someone to message you for coffee and you would reply back…I am kinda busy but a cup of coffee would do a lot good. It’s almost as if a coffee would help you fix a code you have been struggling for a week. Secondly all those arduous hours in the office can’t be spent browsing and orkuting alone – you need a break. A more innovative usage is to use coffee in the meetings. Hardly have I seen a meeting without majority of the people carrying a cup of coffee. Apart from acting as a stimulant – which perhaps keep you awake all through the meeting while you are trying out those new pencil sketches. It also brings the sense of seriousness, more like – yeah this guy means business. For instance if the client ask you a question – and you are absolutely clueless…and you just need that additional 1/100th of a second to think and throw some serious jargon…all you need to do is just lift the cup of coffee as if your throat needs to be bribed for your brain to think. In this nanoeth second you would have probably arrived at some answer which would save your day. And yeah having to work in Cincinnati I don’t have access to very many star bucks and I am forced to go for Millstones or Folgers (P&G brands). I don’t consider either of them to be anywhere close to the Bru instants but still it more than makes up with the pseudness coefficient. So my recipe for a successful meeting is a Tall Regular Coffee with lid, a straw to sip and not to forget a pencil along with a scrap book.

Talking of caffeine, Redux Beverages in Las Vegas is offering a new energy drink branded as ‘Cocaine’. It calls the drink a "legal alternative" to the illegal drug in form of an energy drink, hmm..why not?. With a catchy name like this and 5 times the strength of ‘Red Bull’ I am sure that it would do good rounds of business. The drink actually doesn’t have any coke in it, it’s just the excess cocaine which apparently gives that numb sensation of its name sake. Now that’s one hell of a reason for many of us to try it. It’s a different issues that it has the drink itself has run into problems with the conservatives calling it too inappropriate a name. I am not sure how coco-cola manages to survives under the nemesis of coke. Isn’t it the more colloquial name of cocaine or was it cocaine which took the name coke from coco-cola?

Finally working in HP Americas has its own positives, one of them being the ‘Coffee Talks’. Coffee Talks within HP are held at various locations within US and graced by the biggies of HP; two of the more prolific Coffee Talks that I have attended were hosted by Mark Hurd (CEO), and the other by Carly Fiorina (erstwhile CEO). Now ‘Coffee Talks’ are also webcasted for the benefit of larger audience within world wide HP. Due to differences in time zone and pure laziness I never used to attend these talks. Ever since I am here I hardly have missed any of these ‘Coffee Talks’. Apart from getting to interact with the gurus of Silicon Valley you get to know the quarterly results, strategy over the next quarter and occasionally my bonus.
Now you might ask me what the heck, its some thing which is done across many organizations and just that HP calls it ‘Tea Talk’ instead of ‘Coffee Talk’. If it were an Infosys they would come up more innovative name like ‘Namma Filter Coffee Talk’ or a ‘4G Coffee Talk’. Hang on here is the interesting part; I was always under the impression that I would be served coffee & cookies to-go since the program itself is called ‘Coffee Talk’. After being a veteran of two Coffee Talks – it stuck me that the term ‘Coffee Talk’ is actually a misnomer - for there ain’t no coffee being served (On, before or after the talk). On the third occasion, I did a little bit of investigation while in the auditorium and results were no different. No coffee served again. It needed a much closer observation to figure – that the meetings are usually conducted in the noon (around 2pm) and most people in the audience carried their own cup of Folgers. Voila Code cracked.