A Day in the Life: Tea break
Well, not that I'm having tea yet, but plan to, as soon as I send this off.
So far I have, of course, done nothing about my thesis. I have instead been doing some research (finding articles but not actually reading them) for my teaching research project, and hoping I get the OK to proceed with it in its new form. Long story. Basically I want to do a little project on how online group discussions can enhance/affect face-to-face tutorial discussions.
The computer is not working properly - in that the internet is really slow. Blaah.
On the topic of teatime: when I was working (I did two years of various short contracts mainly in state government before coming back to study) it always surprised me how much eating there was: you arrive at work between 8.30 and 9am, and you have morning tea at 10.30am. You have a 30-minute (give or take, you have flexi time to play with) lunch break sometime between 12noon and 2pm. At 3.30pm you have afternoon tea. Sometimes people feel obliged to bring cake because it's their birthday, sometimes you have a longer team lunch - and in one particular place Croissant Express was only a 30-second elevator ride away, so the hot chocolates were a constant companion.
I haven't really had the same thing at uni - we don't really have morning/afternoon tea in the same (sociable) way - if you're desperate for a quick procrastination, you might grab someone by the arm and inflict "getting coffee" on them.
When I'm at my desk I tend to nibble constantly - in one day I can hoover up a 300g packet of pecans, 200g of dried cranberries, assorted chocolate bars (I quite like the new Flings), a packet of crisps and one or two of the unnecessarily yummy chocolate-hazelnut cookies that cost only 60 cents at the Rec Centre. So I don't always even have a meal - either because I forgot or because I brought my weeks' worth of snacks in that day and sort of couldn't control myself. One day I drank six small lunchbox-size fruit juices. They were supposed to last me the week.
(edit: this post was going to be longer, but for some reason MRS shut me out and only published this bit. Oh well)