Wednesday, February 11, 2009

Earl Grey Tea

I hereby offer some tips to those who want to find spots in the library during Midterms.
  1. Wake up early. Even at 9:30AM, there are still sufficient open spaces.
  2. There are more places to go than just Stauffer.
  3. If you see a bunch of people going upstairs, to potentially the same floor you're going to, use the elevator. It gives you an edge in this competitive world where demand for library seats always exceed supply (this is, however, a rather seasonal trend).
  4. Have an Earl Grey tea by your side at all times.
Tea is really good for you. It gives you something meaningful to do while you study a subject like propensity to unionize. And it keeps you awake, and is less harmful than coffee. A bit of milk and sugar is good. This is slightly revolting against the Chinese side of my culture, where it's blasphemous to drink green tea with anything but the tea itself. But in Mongolian culture, milk tea is a typical morning drink. The ingredients are different though. And where I come from it's a nomadic, rather than an elitist Victorian tradition. Mongolian fighters drank milk tea before they went to battle.

That reminds me, I always double-cup my cups. This is part of a habit I developed working at McDonald's. Because McD's doesn't have these heat pads around the cup, so to avoid burning someone's hand, you always have to double cup hot beverages for customers. For some reason, I now do this for not only hot beverages, but for the cold ones as well. It can be a good habit when you fill half of your cup with ice. It gives the beverage more support.

But that gives me another dilemma. It's awkward chewing ice in the library. You're always wondering if you're annoying the people next to you. But cracking and grinding ice with your teeth can be sufficiently helpful when you're experiencing writer's block.

Happy studying.

P.S. Why can't we learn something useful in HR, like job design? Employee motivation? Managerial strategies?