Today, as I was sipping another insipid cup of tea, I realized how Arthur Dent must have felt on board the Heart of Gold, unable to get a decent cup of tea to drink. That is exactly the situation here. Let me first talk about Infy. In broad terms, there are two sources of tea here – man and machine.

Man-made tea is available in the canteens (or food courts as people who like to glorify everything call them). Machine-made tea is available on every floor in every building from Coffee Machines. Now Coffee Machines is a misnomer, because they also provide tea. Of course, when I am through with this article, we will have proved that they provide neither tea nor coffee. A few months earlier, I had talked about how dumb these machines are.

I will talk about the machines first, because these are very easily and very frequently accessible. The main reason these machines are flawed is that the first principles from which they were built are flawed and based on circular reasoning – “X is a coffee machine. Hence anything that comes out of X is coffee. As anything X produces is Coffee, X is a coffee machine.” The result is some of the most horrible tea you will ever taste anywhere. Actually it is the label on the button which says “Tea” that lets you know that you are drinking tea. Worn-out and torn-off labels cause a lot of trouble. Employees have mistaken these machines at various times as Sweet-n-Sour soup machines and Benadryl vending machines. Then there was this guy who mistook the machine for an oil depot. He actually poured black coffee all over the bearings in his bike.

Of course all this happens when the machines are actually working. Which is not all that often. A lot of the white ones have these series of LED’s. I would often wonder what their purpose was. There were rumours that this guy had hooked up the machines to his SETI screensaver, and the LED’s would blink in a pseudo-random response to the data being processed. Now, I know for a fact that they are just indicators for NO POWER, BROKEN and OUT OF COFFEE. One of them is always on.

Some machines produce tea directly, others spew out warm milk in which you dip tea bags. Those that produce tea directly are the worst offenders. They have absolutely no clue about what tea is. Some serious reprogramming is required. About the second category, the tea-bags in themselves are not that bad. But then tea from tea-bags dipped in milk is not tea, is it?

The last thing that needs to be mentioned is that these machines have now evolved self-consciousness. More than anything they feel ashamed of their output. Depending upon how bad the beverage is they are producing, they produce a matching loud groaning sound. At times, these sounds have been known to drown the sonic booms from passing supersonic aircraft.

The man-made tea in the canteens is based on one basic principle – “Either put too much milk or put too much sugar. Add tea only if there are riots from serious tea-drinkers.” When I first joined Infy, there was an entirely different method for preparing tea. They would force-feed the cow with tea leaves, and then try to pass off the milk they got from her as tea. That worked for a few months. But not before long their cover was blown. The cow was rescued by the SPCA. She is now doing a reality show somewhere in LA.

The situation outside Infy is not any better. The “too much milk too much sugar” is the prevalent type of tea preparation. That anybody would not want these in abundance is not comprehensible to the folk.

All in all it makes you tear your hair out in frustration. No wonder then that I feel like running down to Mumbai every weekend for the wonderful, hot and perfect cup of tea made at home.