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Drinking at work

21:17 / 08.12.04

Now that the Christmas season is upon us, the frequency of drinking at work or during the work day is likely to be greatly increased. (Not me. I'm not working. Job, anyone?)

But yeah. What are your experiences or opinions of worktime drinking? Are you in a job where everyone has a couple of pints at lunchtime every day? Do you go out on a Friday en masse and waste the afternoon? Do you regularly have a session after work and then drag yourself back to the suburbs on the last train? And how does that affect you?

For myself, I hate drinking at lunchtime - well, I hate it if I can't spend the rest of the day drinking. I can't stand sobering up and getting dehydrated in the office air-conditioning. (I have seen people drink four pints in an hour and a half over a work pub trip though.) After work - I'm all for it, as long as it's an organic development and I can pick the people, and it isn't some sort of enforced work bonding thing.

22:02 / 08.12.04

My when I had my interview for what proved top be my first proper job I was told 'now, we don't mind if you go to the pub at lunchtime and don't come back, as long as it isn't everyday'. On Fridays we'd go to the pub around 1pm to play pool and stay there until 4pm returning briefly to turn off the macs (or play networked computergames) before bundling off to the pub for about 6. But this was during the dot.com bubble...

22:18 / 08.12.04

The rules

Drink at luchtime only if:

a/ You don't have to go back.
b/ Your boss is with you and is drinking as much as you. Match him/her pint for pint.
c/ It's Christmas eve and so therefore you can be fairly sure you don't have to get back for anything vital.
d/ You're on drugs and so therefore won't fall asleep at your desk later on.
e/ Your boss has taken the rest of the day off.
f/ You have a temporary job and so therefore don't give a flying fuck.
g/ You hate your job and want to be fired.
f/ You like the feeling of trying to disguise the fact you're actually asleep by having a complicated looking document up on screen whilst sitting with your head resting in at least one hand.

They're my drinking at lunchtime rules. Even one glass of wine is no good for me. One glass of wine and I either feel plastered due to having no lunch, or get instantly in the vibe and want to stay for the rest of the day. Neither of these is ideal, or in fact at all conducive to keeping one's job.

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

22:25 / 08.12.04

When I worked days, I'd always take a really late lunch (usually 3 o'clock), so I could get three or four pints in and lay the groundwork for the post-pub drinking, and only have to work for two hours before the next beer. In retrospect, it wasn't terribly clever of me.

Now I work nights it's trickier. Monday mornings, at shift's end, everyone piles down to the pub that's open from 6:30am and generally spends most of the day there.

I've turned up drunk twice (both after Nick Cave gigs) and it really wasn't fun. Nor was it easy staying awake.

22:46 / 08.12.04

Wow. I'm slightly shocked. Within the NHS, drinking at lunchtime is an absolute no-no. You just don't do it. That sentiment permeates the entire working culture: a few years back, I attended a work Christmas party where it was arranged that we'd meet at the office just after 5pm, before heading off to a restaurant; I made the mistake of bringing champagne, thinking, "after 5, out-patient setting, no patients, one glass'll set us up nicely". It was as if I'd suggested mutual scat-play. The bottle was duly opened and dispensed to sad plastic cups but everyone was very obviously uncomfortable.

23:40 / 08.12.04

Well, I can understand that in safety-critical (or potentially safety-critical) professions things are a little different. However, nobody really cares whether a few office monkeys fuck up a spreadsheet... it's likely enough to happen on Friday afternoon anyway. At the end of the day (© Trisha) it doesn't really affect anyone.

23:48 / 08.12.04

Yes but...

Bugger.

Yes but it does! What, for example, if my boss and I make a decision on something we're curently considering on behalf of the public, when we're half cut? That's not OK, is it?

But in theory it doesn't matter. I'm a civil servant. I am one of your office monkeys. I type all day and I make up tables (in rainbow colours, but still). A drunken me shouldn't affect anyone's life. But it absolutely would.

N.B. I'm not sure what I'm arguing for here since I have just realised that previously upstream I suggested that the main reasons for not getting drunk at work are merely to protect your job...

23:51 / 08.12.04

A La: Yesssh. Knock down Stonehenge. Sell it to the Americansh. Bollocksh to it, I wanna drink.

Applicashon passhed. *Stampsh.*

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

23:55 / 08.12.04

As a civil servant, chances are you rely on people like me for your press cuttings.
So if WE'RE all shitfaced, YOU don't know what's going on...

there are consequences, it's true. They're just not so immediate in office work.

After complaining about it for the last few years, I've realised I actually enjoy working on New Year's Eve. There's sod all in the papers on NYD and most of out clients are away anyway, so there's very little work to do, and we're allowed- well, encouraged is probably closer to the mark- to bring in booze. And because I like the people I work with, it really just boils down to getting drunk with your mates- just a different bunch of mates than otherwise. Usually by the time the late editions arrive on New Year's Day, I've been told I'm no longer trusted to read them, and instructed that what I should do is sit down with some cigarettes and a bottle of whisky until the buses start again. Which I have no problem with.

00:01 / 09.12.04

Aha.

That, in theory, is how it works. But in actual fact your press cuttings are written by scary civil servants like me who have decided (for reasons we do not wish to disclose) to only tell you the minimal amount of information we can get away with!

Press office? What press office?

Press office: We need to release a statement about such and such.
Me: We'll have it for you in half an hour.

Pisshed or otherwishe.

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

00:04 / 09.12.04

Funnily enough, we do get sent the press releases so we know what to look out for. But drunk or not, no-one ever bothers to read them.
There really is a Kafkaesque level of pointless bureaucracy here, isn't there? It's like being in Brazil (the film, not the country).

00:18 / 09.12.04

Don't worry - pissed or not, those of us in the public don't believe a word of it anyway. Well, those of us with any sense.

00:24 / 09.12.04

Working in a press office, I can complete the circle by assuring you that the people who pass the work of drunk people (*looks at olulabelle*) to drunk people (*looks at Stoatie*) are, themselves, often drunk.

I agree with oluabelle's list, with point (b) in bold type. I'm not a huge fan of daytime drinking myself, but it's often better for your career than working hard. There's only one way down a slippery slope and that's to slide.

13:26 / 09.12.04

I've rarely had a problem with lunchtime drinking because I have a history of landing jobs where people think I'm busy but I actually spend hours (and sometimes days) at a time with literally nothing to do but surf the net. So if anyone ever suggests a beer at lunch I'm always up for it. However whether this happens is down to the habits of my colleagues, something that varies with each job.

At most jobs lunchtime drinks have been only occasional events, but at one job I worked with a bunch of pissheads and we went to the pub almost every single day for about 1.5 hours and drank four pints just about every time. It was great. I'd come back to my desk and surf the net feeling nice and mellow, then toddle off home.

Two points to note though:

1. As Fridge says, the daytime hangover can be horrible. The only answer is either to drink water like mad, or as Stoatie says, try and minimize the time between drinks. Not always easy to do however. It's always the case with daytime drinking - you have to keep drinking or you just end up feeling like shit all evening.

2. The quality of my work has never (to my knowledge) been harmed by having had a couple of pints. The only thing that would be affected is the quantity of work I get done, which would be quite low. But then as I said, I rarely do anything productive after lunchtime anyway.

17:56 / 09.12.04

Wow, Loomis. I want your jobs - any of them!

However, I do work in a job where, while regular at-work drinking is generally frowned upon, it's perfectly acceptable to get completely shitfaced at work on certain sanctioned occasions. Teaching English to young adults, you can definitely go to the pub with them on occasion - the night classses seem to go every friday, and I've heard tell of classes that go to the pub every night after break, and of course you can have parties with them in class. When we have parties I always encourage my class to bring alcoholic drinks from their own countries so "we" (me) can "sample the international delights."

Last Friday we had to have a late-night workshop, so we all got big cans of Carling to drink during the session. Not too bad.

That said, the official line is only on special occasion, and we recently had someone sacked for drinking on the job. Though she was really almost actively trying to get sacked for it. Also we only get two 20-minute breaks for lunch and whatever else you want to do for each 3 hour shift, so there's only so much time to get to the pub and back, let alone actually drink anything. That's why it's best to take the students down for "conversational practice."

I think England is much more encouraging of drinking at work and drinking with workmates. In the States, at least at the places I used to work, lunchtime drinking seemed basically verboten - a total no-no. But maybe I just was in the wrong line of work. It's been my experience that PR flacks and journos are the biggest on-the-job boozehounds.

18:09 / 09.12.04

I think England is much more encouraging of drinking at work and drinking with workmates. In the States, at least at the places I used to work, lunchtime drinking seemed basically verboten - a total no-no.

This certainly jibes with my experience. When I was working in Corporate America®, it was not just verboten, but considered borderline depravity to drink during working hours - lunchtime or no. Once one the maintenance guys grabbed a beer from the fridge (yeah, we had a few beers in the company fridge, like some kind of moral trap) and that became the subjects of much whispering - "Buddy drank a beer! While he was working!"

One time in the year and a half I was there, the honchos took the architect and one woman office drone out to lunch at a Chinese restaurant and - scandalous! - came back a bit tipsy, laughing about having had mai tais. It was just this weird elitist rubbing-it-in-the-face of we lowly AP and AR administrators that they allowed themselves the delicious sin of drinking at lunchtime.

Bastards. God I hated that job.

18:40 / 09.12.04

I hate luchtime drinking, which is funny considering how attached I am to bottles of any description the rest of the time. In my experience the only people who can do it on a regular basis are the ones who are utterly incompetent at their jobs, but because these jobs invariably involve taking the credit/blame for other people's work. The being drunk (or worse, dragging the rest of us along) doesn't directly affect their performance. I'm sure there are others, but I'm trying to think of anyone who has persuaded me to do the lunchtime booze thing who wasn't a high-flying feckless leech - and failing.

00:11 / 10.12.04

While i was working as a phone monkey in the help desk of a large company, me and my mate would make sure we went every lunchtime to the pub, when we got back an hour and two or three pints later we found we were BETTER at our jobs and could handle the abuse and arsyness of shit giving public with grace and good humour. and if we ever made horrible mistakes we would give false names or just giggle for a bit and hang up.

Names we would give-
1) Kyle - fresh faced 18 year old new kid who we hated for being younger and better looking than us
2) Horatio Fantabulo III
3) and once ritchie even claimed to be Dean Gaffney but i dont think they beilived him for long

also when we left, after a monster two hour lunch we spent the afternoon on the phone to the girls in data admin and talked them into changing all our bosses expense account details to include titles like Lord, ambassador and my favorite Wing Commander.

Once when i worked in a pub, they made me work New Years Eve but told me it would be ok to drink, i dont remember much of that night but my mate kept count of all the drink apparantly i had, 8 pints of larger, i bottle of jack daniels (not the catering size), half a bottle of champange, three shots of glenlivet and a snowball.
the next day i felt unsuprisingly ruff but still had to work, the car journy was a nightmare and i felt so sick that when i arrived i walked straight past my boss behind the bar to the nearest sink and promtly threw up, by the time id finished cleaning it up my boss had his coat on and car ready to take me home. he never did rota me on for NYE again

00:24 / 10.12.04

Actually, thinking about it, I can remember one drinking-at-work occasion - sort of at-work, anyway.

A few years back, I was pressganged into helping organise the psychiatric long cases for medical student finals. This meant finding sufficient numbers of psychiatric patients willing to talk to students, describe some good symptoms, but not be so unwell they couldn't give a history. In practice, this wasn't too hard, as there tends to be a hardcore of 'professional patients': individuals who ask to be contacted each year, and are all too willing to be interviewed, repeatedly if necessary. They get paid the princely sum of £10 per interview (around one hour) and can do up to five per day, so it's reasonably popular.

Anyway, I was charged with conveying a small group of (mostly out-)patients to a hospital on the other side of town, where the exams were taking place. We got a taxi, they all did their bit (and I got them, privately, to 'score' the medical students afterwards - they were pretty good at picking out the Fails and the Merits) and, around 4pm, we wandered out onto the street to get another cab back...

... and, finding it hard to hail one, decided to hit the pub instead. It felt really weird, actually, and I had all sorts of odd, conflicting feelings about it. On the one hand, it was nice to interact on a basis other than strictly-defined doctor-patient (they'd all just earned money, which added to the general after-work atmosphere); on the other, I was (probably irrationally) terrified one of my colleagues would drive past, look in the window, and decided I was overstepping professional boundaries. I bought a round, had a pint bought for me, then headed off.

That, I'm afraid, is pretty much the only time I've gone drinking in office hours.

00:36 / 10.12.04

*thread rot* its weird being a barman and having the complete strangers treat you as a shrink (a complete cliche i know but a true one) i try not to give advice anymore and just say uh-huh in the right places. Who first made the presumtion that barmen give a toss? and if they do are anyway qualifed to give advice? *thread rot over go back to reavealling nasty drink/work storys*

00:39 / 10.12.04

I know what you mean. It pisses me off when my patients expect me to mix them a perfect vodka martini.

00:42 / 10.12.04

*thread rot over go back to reavealling nasty drink/work storys*

Fuck that. Tell us all the dark secrets you get to hear about as a barman, dude. Bardude. Man.

01:56 / 10.12.04

When I worked for NY state, I had to specifically ask restaurants not to serve alcohol to any of our employees during company outings, because we'd all be seven different layers of fucked if anyone who answered to anyone who answered to anyone actually elected found out. The meds I take render me a total lightweight, so I'd have to ask for a third of a rum and coke, or an eighth of a shot. Besides, I'd be very likely to accidently put someone's eye out with his/her own glasses if I took an alcohol break on the clock.

01:57 / 10.12.04

Nesh: ice in first and dont skip on vermouth

Bed: maybe in a differant thread

07:51 / 10.12.04

ice in first and dont skip on vermouth

Remind me not to ask for one at your bar. Crushed ice, rinse with vermouth and then throw away liquid. Pour frozen vodka/gin over ice to chill and flavour it and then strain into glass. No ice in glass, and just a hint of the vermouth, thankyou. Tchoh! Why does no-one who works in a bar ever know this?

07:59 / 10.12.04

Fuck, I am allowed to drink at work.

What was the question?

08:05 / 10.12.04

Yep, that's the way. More partial to the Gin variety myself. When I was younger me and a friend tried making vodka martini's clueless as we were, we just kept mixing vermouth and vodka again and again. Disgusting. My friend became a little partial to drinking straight vermouth after that though.

Okay, back to thread.

I work in what is comically referred to (in UK anyway) as the film industry. There is a definite group of workers in this field that drink at work as a rule (electricians and crafts men are all very partial to an afternoon pint or two). Of the French crews that I've worked with, the idea of lunch not being a couple of relaxed hours with some good wine is a waste. And if you ever visit a post-production house, the first thing they do is offer you a drink (often a beer - having fridges full of the stuff as a mini-perk for the poor runners that work there into the wee hours for no money).

I myself can't do drinking in the afternoon, it leaves me feeling very groggy and gives me a stinking headache at around the 4 o clock mark.

08:48 / 10.12.04

I work in an office doing nothing of any consequence and I semi-regularly have pint along with a pub lunch and I don't really find it has any effects beyond a propensity to yawn more.
Anything more than 1 pint is a little different as I begin to feel the effects so will only do so on special occasions when I know I won't be expected to do any work when I get back.
When I was working as a builder everyone used to go out every lunch time and just get bevvied up, it was quite worrying as they then came back and started operating heavy machinery. In the end the site foreman had to lay down the law as it was getting stupid.

08:56 / 10.12.04

Benny i too work in 'the film industry' and have shot in france- I was told its actually a union stipulation that wine be provided with the set catering. God knows where this leaves health and safety?

It always amazed me that the big studios (Pinewood, Ealing & Shepperton) have their own pubs on the lot- as you say the a certain proportion of the crew generally speaking sparks & riggers) will spend an entire lunchtime guzzling pints before hoisting half a ton of lighting into the walkways that run over the studio roof.

I find it a little more excusable if your job is in an office - but while opperating dangerous machinery/ other people relying on your competence I often find it appaling. The problem with tackeling this head on is that Sparks have the stronger union- any doubt on their competence will lead to a walk out by all the other electricians. I'm actually suprised that their hasn't yet been a big accident on set as a result of boozing. Also it leads to the other question would the Assitant Director (or floor manager) be legally responsible for letting someone work while under the influence?

Personally I don't drink at all in the day at work- for the simple reason- i can't function, as I work as an editor now I will often have a beer from the fridge if working late- it does take the edge off it- but more than one and my eyes go squiffy and my work rate slows down...

pointless and uncalled for

10:40 / 10.12.04

The general (tacit) rule of thumb in central government is "have a reason". This way eveyone knows that there is a distinct chance that you, or someone you work with will be coming back to work with a dimished capacity to perform their regular duties and has some advanced warning.

The idea is that you can clear you desk and make sure that you won't have to do anything you're not capable of handling. After that you get to do a bit of networking (read, sit in the smoking room with a large glass of water and chain your way through a mack of marley light because you have the odd one when you have a drink). You should be cautious though because anything said under alcohol is admissible at the next mission critical meeting and your colleagues could end up stitching you for that promotion they want. Of course you could be like me and drink in moderation but if there aren't enough alcoholics aroun here barbelith might die.

There is also the danger that it might become "alright" to ask out the cute woman on the security desk.

11:30 / 10.12.04

Mr Sock - I once witnessed a production manager surrounded by sparks when the PM pointed out that the contract stated that no alcohol or illegal drugs were to be consumed during work hours. The Gaffer actually said 'my boys need a drink' at one point. Very worrying. But you are right, they are about the only area of the film industry that is well protected by their union (BECTU is a joke), and also they tend to be rush/twiddle your thumbs type workers, so always have an hour or two to sleep it off.