You would think that the more senior in status a person the more elegant the glass jar. But this doesn’t appear to be true. I have a colleague in the office who is a salesman. He owns two houses and a car; he is a most distinguished business man. His jar is the most disgusting un-lidded ex Nescafe jar I’ve ever seen.   He brings this dirty looking jar to the board room to drink from. It has its upper half increasingly stained with a revolting brown grunge. The liquid he drinks from it is clear in nature and I have never seen even the remotest sign of a tea leaf in it. I have pondered it might be the secret receptacle for drinking vodka from, or that nasty Chinese fire water they buy in 200ml bottles for very little money.

I have seen other guys in the office with old coffee jars in various states of wash and in various colours, such as filthy beige and smog grey. One of the guys has a brown one; I suppose this is supposed to stop you seeing the mould growing up the sides. I have never been able to assign a status to a person by the type of jar they own and as I said earlier the best I could do is assign a level of how conservative a person is by how old fashion their jar is.

For instance I was in going to the airport in a hotel Audi and the driver had a very tall clear glass This was very much a designer glass, fashioned to fit the décor of the Audi, although the glass looked expensive the gentleman would not have been on the kind of salary and benefits my colleague salesman from the office is. However the gentleman was a hip young man with a pleasant air and modern outlook to life. This adds weight to my argument about the type of jar is a case of traditionalist verses modernist.

Another example of the status issue is a cab driver who was drinking out of a very fancy jar. This jar had a top on it and the glass was blue with a small light blue band around the top of it. This band had a loop of blue plastic standing up from its top that was used as a handle. The jar was very fancy and certainly out of the station of a mere cab driver who doesn’t make as much in a day as our salesman spends on latte at Starbucks twice a day.