Food on the bridge.

[Elder Knight]

Maybe the captain's chair has a pop-out cup holder? Those buttons on his arm rest have to control something, right?

Or maybe all the computer workstations had CD drives that could be deployed in a pinch!

 

[Lance]

My 'food on the bridge' issue is more of a 'coffee on the bridge' issue. Whenever one of those yeoman are handing out cups to the crew, where could they possibly set them down? Sulu and Uhura, for example, are out of luck, with their slanted work stations. And the armrest of Kirk's ever-whirling chair seems pretty precarious, too.

That leaves the railings, which are sort of inconveniently out of reach, when one has to get up out of their chair every time they want to take a sip. The only real option is to hold the cup, which could be problematic if the ship suddenly goes to red alert!

On Enterprise, when Tucker wanted to add a cup holder to the Captain's chair, I thought it was a good idea! Reed certainly wasn't looking ahead to the future when he said "Just what the Captain needs during a crisis: a place to rest his beveridge". Kirk and crew certainly did!

This reminds me of the story John Eaves tells in the Star Trek The Next Generation Scrapbook where, during production on First Contact, for a practical joke he and another art staffer faked a memo from production designer Herman Zimmerman requesting "coffee caddies" for scenes suggesting the crew would be attended to on the bridge during stressful situations by waitresses serving coffee. The gist of the joke being that a third art staffer, unaware that it wasn't a real memo, was being asked by 'Herman' to design these 24th century drinks trolleys.

Maybe not such a silly idea after all?