Lunch and tea breaks were provided at the event.
There are two counters serving coffee and tea throughout the event. Each counter is manned by two staff, each in charge of one beverage.
There were no signs indicating which side is for tea and which for coffee.
If you wanted tea and approached the staff in charge of coffee, she would inform her colleague to pour the drink for you and vice versa.
During the break, a queue quickly formed naturally on the side where the lady was serving tea.
As more people preferred to have tea, this resulted in a bottleneck as the staff serving tea struggled to meet the demand.
She not only had to ask for their choice, she had to refer them to her colleague if they wanted coffee. She had to pour the tea and place it on the saucer before placing it on the wooden box (where the tea pot was concealed) for the attendees or hand it to them.
Occasionally, the staff serving coffee was heard shouting to those in the queue, "Coffee over this side."
Due the the level of noise and that most of the attendees queuing were busy fiddling their phones or engaged in a conversation, her message wasn't heard.
When she sees that there's no request for coffee, she would helped to serve tea occasionally. She would pour the tea and placed them on top of the box.
But that did not help speed up the queue. At this point, the attendees will still ask her, "Is this coffee or tea?"
Even if an attendee wanted coffee and was asked to approach the staff serving coffee, they would still ask the same question just to make sure they got the right beverage.
For those who wanted coffee, there is no reason to join the queue. They could have just form another queue at the coffee side instead of joining an existing queue. Why get yourself stranded with a large group of people who want tea?
But hey, there's a queue and we gotta follow the queue. That's the natural way to behave, isn't it?
The hotel could have put a label on each side indicating the beverage.
This would have saved the staff the hassle of asking each attendee for their choice and concentrate on filling the cups and serving as many people as quickly instead.