Yep. If you try to run a construction site in Australia without coffee / tea supplies, your best possible outcome is being laughed off the site. The worst possible outcome involves your head on a stake, which is fair.
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I adore that tea is such a critical component in every other land the Kingdom has “touched” except the US. I’m a daily tea drinker and I would kill to have had anything other than gas station Lipton and tepid water available to me.
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We use a portable power bank thingy with a 110v plug to run the grinder with. Throw it in the aeropress and then light a match and boil on the household stove… too bad we have to rely on this quite often due to pg&e
A colleague was a former commercial saturation diver. Any job included up to a week sitting in a decompression chamber on a boat deck. I asked about coffee.
“I’m from Melbourne [ed: a capital-C Coffee town]. Of course we sorted out coffee. We weren’t allowed any ignition sources inside the chamber, but there’s a small airlock hatch in the chamber to get medical supplies in. They’d pass a freshly-boiled kettle in through that hatch, and we had an Aeropress setup ready to go.”
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Good thing they were passing the kettle into a higher pressure area, rather than lower!
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Bubbly!
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Has anyone made some kind of water-boiler accessory somehow powered by the engines of work trucks along the same lines as that unit that was standard in British tanks?
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that is absolutely amazing. Stuff that is routine work would be a adventure story for other people.
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I pushed an idiot stick back in the day 
Your comment about the foremen knowing coffee runs could involve a joint or booze brought back some memories… the old guys would usually have one of these full of homebrewed.
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Every hobby seems to have this guy*. The guy who has $20k in lenses for his $8k camera body, but never takes any photos. The guy with a three car garage full of industrial machine tools who never actually builds anything. The guy with a full music studio with three walls covered in modular synths and a fourth covered in guitars but doesn’t actually write any music.
I don’t wanna get all gate-keepey with these people but it does annoy me on some fundamental level. They don’t care about the actual craft of what they are engaged in, they just want the toys and to feel like they are doing the thing (and tell everyone how into the thing they are). I guess they’re entitled to spend their money however they want, but it annoys me just the same.
*and sorry, it is always men
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Our US headquarters site has a special set of tea equipment because people from the UK site sometimes visit on business; and it’d be 1812 all over again if they were pointed to a Keurig.
The situation is not deemed quite important enough to get 230v from the server room run out to the kitchen area; so they still have to deal with weak colonial electric kettle speeds.
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Me too. I calm myself by remembering that when they upgrade their equipment to get better stuff they won’t use, people who can make excellent use of it can buy the older stuff cheap and barely used, which is nice. It’s like these guys are volunteering to pay the depreciation for someone who could really use that bit of help.
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Very good point! Most of my gear for my hobbies is hand-me-downs from those people. 
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What’s weird is that every work site I’ve worked the emphasis was on water not coffee. Coffee is what you bring from home in the AM. Water or Gatorade is what you get a work.
Coffee on sites I’ve been on would be just silly.
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This is the very reason I have stayed well the fuck away from photography (and many other hobbies with the potential for excessive spending). I KNOW my addictive personality and if I start something I’ve got have ALL THE TOYS!! I would be “that guy”
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I spent the better part of 30 years installing metal-working machines in heavy steel fabrication plants worldwide. I’ve purchased, and abandonded gifted to the operators or the machine, at least a hundred cheap drip coffee machines for use while I was doing installation, training and such. Lots of the automation couldn’t be completed until the machine was in factory and connected to the other machines it would work with. So sometimes I’d spend a few to a few too many weeks in heavy steel fabrication shops with unknow, or inconvenient tome, coffee situations.
I finally wised up and purchased a drip machine, filters, sugar, etc. here, then have it packed inside the multi-ton CNC machinery. Just had to ensure I submitted a manifest.
Buying them locally (here in Canada) meant I didn’t have to worry about voltage or socket type; our machine had a single double socket 120VAC 3-prong grounded outlet in each large cabinet. Very useful for service technicians. But I lost the fight to have more than a 3A fuse installed, since it was for small loads only. So I had to carry 15A fuses or a jumper wire.
I did travel with various coffee makers for use in the hotel. Rotated between Aeropress, a Clever filter cone, or a portable battery-powered espresso maker. All too fussy for the factory floor, these were just for the hotel.
Now I want a coffee…
ETA: the machines I shipped were never thrown away. I usually gifted them to the operator(s) of the machines, on the condition they would ensure it was available when/if I returned for updates, additional training, and the like. Which I often did, and it usually was available. If not, off to the market…
ETA2: sometimes I didn’t trust the local coffee setup. Or this might be mate.
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Wholeheartedly agree. I picked up some Makita tools and batteries second-hand a couple of years ago. Once you have a charger and a sensible number of batteries, many of the other tools in the range are cheap compared to the cost of adding a different system to your collection. Makita therefore has a fairly strong incentive to make everything one could possibly want to power with their batteries.
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I’m pretty sure most modern tanks have a system for providing hot water for the crew to use in their rations, they’re designed to be occupied for days at a time without opening a hatch. It’s just the British ones that get stereotyped as being just for tea.
Although when I looked, it seems like the US buys their ‘Heater, Water & Rations’ from a UK company that invented the original ‘Boiling Vessel’ for the Challenger.
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