Posted: Wed 3 June 2009

How Much Does a Web Design Company Drink?

The Eazytiger water cooler is generally a high-traffic area of our Leicester web design Studio. It's where the team come to rehydrate during their daily struggle to bring the finest web design to the world.

As it's right next to my desk, the water cooler also seems to serve a second function as an excuse for people to come over and give me extra stuff to do. Nobody's that thirsty!

After Gary gave me the idea, I decided to track the water cooler usage. My goal for this test was simple. To see who drank the most water from the water cooler in a typical day.

In the spirit of the scientific method, I decided to run the experiment single-blind so that the participants didn't know they were part of the experiment. Any prior knowledge that an experiment was being performed would bias the experiment and do strange things to the Eazytiger team's drinking habits (which are already quite strange!) For this reason, Gary's results also weren't counted as he came up with the whole idea.

To log my results, I used an Excel spreadsheet which could be hidden from my participants. Results weren't logged during any of the 4.7 seconds I spent away from my desk today. I also didn't count my own water consumption, as this may be influenced by the fact that the cooler tower looms temptingly right next to me.

So on to the results. Who drinks the most water at Eazytiger?

There was only ever going to be one winner. As you can see, our online marketing specialist Andrew Gaukrodger drinks a phenomenal amount of precious Swithland spring water. Assuming he fills each cup to its 200ml capacity, Andy drinks a staggering 1.9 litres a day, or 10.5% of an entire water cooler refill each day.

This also means that Andy has consumed 119.7mg of Magnesium, 41.8mg of Chloride and nearly half a gram of Bicarbonates. Tasty!

Andy was also the most chatty of the experimental subjects, engaging me in conversation for an average of 22 seconds per refill. This used up a total of 7 minutes 33 seconds of our lives, never to be returned.

Extrapolating these figures out to a year, Andy's water consumption habits cost Eazytiger an estimated £72.96 annually. A small price to pay for a fully-hydrated Account Manager though, I feel...

Feel free to use my results to conduct your own follow-up experiments. I have some ideas for related experiments in the future, including an experiment to show a correllation between the amount of cups of coffee drunk and level of job stress... I think I might need an assistant to help me count that one!

By: David Lambie
http://www.eazytiger.net
Web design and ecommerce Leicester

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