Many years ago I worked in the same small department as another engineer who was using the same development gear as I was. We had a fairly formal schedule with

Many years ago I worked in the same small department as another engineer who was using the same development gear as I was. We had a fairly formal schedule with well defined times for tea breaks. We generally sat opposite each other at a table drinking tea and eating biscuits while describing our problems to each other. Neither of us ever really said much about the other person's problems, we certainly didn't attempt to offer any real solutions, but it was striking how many problems that had seemed intractable before the tea break were trivially soluble afterward. We were designing and programming embedded controllers in the early '80s.