Content area
Full text
A Wider Net
Sometimes coffee, soda and ginseng candy just don't give Ben Robinson the boost he needs. That's when he turns to the heavy stuff: caffeinated soap.
"It wakes you up right away, before coffee could be kicking in," says Robinson, a business and technology student at the University of Guelph in Ontario.
"I already knew that a lot of chlorine gets absorbed into your skin when you take a shower, so it seemed reasonable to me that you'd absorb a significant amount of caffeine if you took a long shower and lathered up well," he says.
Robinson resorted to Think-Geek's Shower Shock (200 milligrams of caffeine per shower - twice that of the average cup of coffee) during a near-sleepless period of working long shifts at a tech support center and helping a friend get a Web site online. He's still not quite sure whether to credit the candy or the caffeine in the soap for perking him up, but his attraction to caffeine would seem to make him fit right in to the high-tech industry once his school days are over.
While few still drink Jolt Cola, the beverage that emerged in 1986 with the slogan "twice the caffeine" and played a big part in the romanticized image of developers pulling all-night codefests, caffeine remains a staple of many an IT worker's life. A quick scan of the recycling bin in any office where developers work will likely turn up more than your average collection of empty bottles and cups of Dr. Pepper, Diet Coke, the "energy drink" Red Bull, Arizona's iced Ginseng Tea or...