My boyfriend’s father gave him crack for Christmas.

Ok, ok: not actual crack (which we know from Whitney Houston is “whack”). But close enough: a bag of coffee, complete with its “fresh from the head shop” paraphernalia: a grinder and a French press. Oh, and a fantastic kettle, which I will use for my own non-coffee devices.

Now, when I got my first office job in 1996, I conducted what I called “The Butt Tests.” These test consisted of eating and drinking different substances and then sitting on my butt and observing the effects on my nervous system, mood, and digestion. Refined sugar made me giddy, then exhausted. Carbohydrates made me go into a mild desk-coma. Black tea made me alert and excited to be alive. Green tea kept me gently buzzed for hours and hours.

Coffee, meanwhile, made me sweaty and twitchy, and I would type so fast that my fingers couldn’t keep up. After an hour or so, coffee would drop me on my ass like the jilted crack-ho I was, leaving me begging for another cup and mopping my brow, a fire in my belly that could be a craving or could have just been the beginnings of an ulcer.

I saw quickly that coffee was the methamphetamine of the office world. In coffee land, everyone’s wide-awake. And they want you to join their club where the code words are things like “double half-caff non-fat caramel mochafrappaesspresachino.” That’s actually the country club of coffee drinking. Most of the time you find folks in the coffee crackhouse: low-browing it around the office drip coffeemaker, filling up styrofoam cups that look suspciously like stained mattresses lieing in a dingy basement somewhere.

Moral of the story? Coffee bad! Alternate moral: I’m a tea bigot.

And now, thanks to his father, my boyfriend has joined the dark side of the caffeine empire. Long ago I had a boyfriend who drank coffee. Three triple shots of espresso a day! Once ever few months he would have to quit cold turkey, and would spend a couple days writhing on the floor in pain. Soon, that may be Andreas.

While I sip my tea with milk and honey, he’ll lie twitching on the floor, begging for just one more cup of the good stuff. I’ll shake my head and sigh.