It’s a cool, foggy morning here in the suburban south end of the Salt Lake Valley. Under normal conditions, the Wasatch Mountains loom only a couple of miles from my office window, close enough for me to see individual trees sprouting from the knife-edged crags. Today, the mountains are invisible behind a smooth gray curtain that reminds me of smoke inside a soap bubble. Just the kind of day you want to start off with a nice hot beverage, preferably one with caffeine.

Unfortunately, I was running late this morning and didn’t have the chance to stop anywhere for even a cup of Kwik-E-Mart-style mud, let alone one of those overpriced mocha-latte concoctions (I secretly think those things must contain morphine, because they’re so damn addictive).

No problem, I thought, remembering that I’d taken a few packets of Earl Grey into work a while back to soothe my throat while I battled the first head cold of the season. Actually, I thought, tea might be preferable to coffee, which sometimes is a little too heavy in the mouth. It gave me a warm feeling to think of sitting down in from of my computer on a foggy day with a nice mug of tea. How dignified, how elegant. How English. I smiled as I imagined myself walking up to a magic Star Trek food wall and asking for, “Tea. Earl Grey. Hot.” Just like Captain Picard.

Except when I got to work I remembered that I’d used all of my tea bags earlier in the week. There were still two of them sitting on the corner of my desk, two dessicated little wads of copper-colored paper filled with grainy crumbs, wrapped tightly in their own strings like bodies trussed up for a burial-at-sea.

“Well,” I thought, “I only used them once each. Maybe if I put both of them in a cup of really hot water, I can manage to make me a cuppa.” Pleased with my resourcefulness, I filled a cup and placed it into the office microwave. When it was good and hot, I dropped my elderly tea bags into the water and watched with approval as blooms of amber began to spread.
And how, you may be wondering, did my cuppa turn out? Well, let me tell you, if you’re craving a cup of tea and all you have are a couple of used bags and it occurs to you that maybe you can squeeze one more serving of ingestible liquid out of them… don’t do it. Absolutely do not do this. Not if some kind of vegetable plague has destroyed every last source of caffeine on the planet.

The end result of my little experiment looked like tea. It smelled like tea. It tasted like strained metal filings. And it promptly went down the drain. And now I’m sitting without a hot beverage of any kind, looking out the window at the silvery emptiness of a foggy day.

Just thought you folks in InternetLand needed to know about this. Because knowing is half the battle.