The Tea on the Tea Locker

A couple of over-caffeinated seniors create a tea locker to fight against final semester burnout.

New Roads Seniors Daisy Thwaites and Samantha Brookes, aka the Brewer Buddies, are the co-owners/proprietors of the popular tea locker, the one stop shop for tea, cream, and sugar, available 24 hours a day.

It’s become a welcome addition to the high school campus, and I can’t even remember the dark times where I had to buy a 6-dollar tea at Blueys. So how did it start? According to Thwaites, this idea took a while to steep. In fact it started out as a tense competition between Daisy and another senior. 

“If I drank tea out of a paper cup, he was drinking it out of a metal thermos and insulting me,” Thwaites explains. What started out as a friendly competition, soon reached a boiling point after Winter Break, when Thwaites triumphantly arrived with her brand new insulated thermos, only to find her nemesis had returned with a full on kettle. 

Determined to honor her heritage, she came up with a plan to put that flashy kettle to shame. The next day, she brought all the tea she’d gotten for Christmas and put it in her locker. Sacrificing a safe haven for her schoolbooks was the price she’d have to pay for victory.

The Brewer Buddies, posing in front of the locker

From that day forward, the tea locker has become a warm ,caffeinated secret amongst friends, until the Brewer Buddies decided they had no right to deny people Daisy’s birthright. ‘I’m British so tea means a lot to me, and I want to spread that with [sic] others,”Thwaites said. Needless to say, the locker’s popularity has skyrocketed. 

But it’s not just the students whose hearts and cold hands have been captured by the Tea Locker’s charm. It’s faculty too, with French teacher Frank Matcha and Middle School Science teacher Mr. T (no pun intended) being some of the locker’s most devoted patrons.

“I think something like this was exactly what the school needed, it brings people together and creates a sense of community, T said.  And what does Mr. T hope to see in the future? “I hope that the tea locker becomes like a tradition at New Roads and continues for years to come and that Freshman Lulu Thwaites becomes the successor Brewer Buddy”

From the outside, it seems like running the Tea locker is easy as chai but, in reality, it’s anything but. To get the real cream and sugar of running the locker, the Brewer Buddies let me co-run the locker with them for one, short week, and The Brewer Buddies became The Tea Musketeers. 

The first couple days were  simple enough, I kept inventory and helped them restock. It wasn’t until the 3rd day that trouble started brewing. On Wednesday morning March 13th, 8:35 am PST we opened the locker to find an utter Tea-saster. The once pristine and very respectable locker was now a metal garbage can littered with empty creamer pockets, exploded teabags,tea bag wrappers, and broken stirring sticks.  

Matcha and Thwaites, posing in front locker on a crisp Wednesday morning

After cleaning up, I asked The Brewer Buddies what the protocol is when a (tea pun) bandit leaves wreckage like this. “It happens sometimes, it’s really annoying because it’s wasting our money and we don’t like having to clean up after them,” Brookes said.

Other than the occasional tea bandit, running the tea locker was a lot of fun, the best part was at the end of the week, when we opened the locker to find 3 whole dollars in the tip jar. “ People donate sometimes and we really appreciate it,” Thwaite said. 

REPORTER’S NOTE: (she also wants me to encourage everyone reading this to tip the locker when they get the chance.)