The clock just struck 3, and you can hardly wait. Your heart
is beating a little bit faster, a nervous sweat is gathering on your forehead,
and your mouth is starting to water in anticipation. Like a woman possessed,
you bolt from your desk and head for the office lounge. It's the moment
you've been waiting for all day long your late afternoon coffee break.
Whether you're drawn to the coffee machine by the tempestuous winds
of gossip that seem to flow in and around her, or simply lured from
your desk by the enchanting aroma, one thing's for sure: the coffee
break is the most important part of your workday.
Coffee and philosophy
Although you probably don't consider a trip to the coffee machine to
be anything more than an excuse to leave your desk for a few minutes,
this fifteen-minute ritual can be essential to maintaining your mental
health at work. As one coffee distributor boasts, the coffee break can
bring a social element to an otherwise cold and isolated workday, and
this "greatly helps to increase each employee's productivity."
In the words of cultural theorist Michel de Certeau, this little break
from the everyday is "a way of thinking invested in a way of acting."
And for ethnologist Jean-Pierre Jardel, the coffee break is a fundamental
rite of corporate culture, a ritual that offers us access to an important
social sphere.
Not only does a quick trip to the coffee machine allow you the opportunity
to gab with co-workers for a few minutes, but in more philosophical
terms it enables you to master the most formidable of foes: time. Next
time your boss tells you to stop chatting and get back to work, just
tell her that you're busy breaking the hold of linear time. In order
to be most productive, you need to see time as a series of fragments
or cycles rather than one eight-hour line. Not only is your coffee break
good for your psychological well-being, but it's essential to the financial
health of your company as well.
As Jardel noted in his study of two banking agencies (one of which
eliminated company coffee breaks), absenteeism, tension, and internal
conflicts all shot up in the company without the coffee break, while
employee productivity fell to a new low.
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