I work from home, but go to our main office several times a year. Lots of teams have mini fridges in their areas where they keep beer along with soft drinks. I know at least one guy who has multiple bottles of Bourbon at his desk. Drinking at lunch or on the way out is no big deal at all; showing up to work drunk would be. You’re expected to keep it in moderation.
In the 90s, I remember multiple drinking lunches. Not all the time, but not uncommon for the boss to bring the team out for a fun lunch on a slow Friday.
Prior to becoming disabled about 2 years ago, I worked in tech for roughly 20 years.
Thirsty Thursdays - drinking. Different teams hosted. Not uncommon to have a cart that wheeled around. Mixed drinks and beer both.
Weds and Tuesdays both had cute names too, but less participation.
Huge holiday and quarter end parties.
Because there was also no such thing as not being at work, it was common to show up, sit and talk for a while, then take your drink back to your desk and keep working.
I miss the people, but I like not having conference calls at 2 am on Saturday. Tech is nuts.
It was routine early in my career for the whole team to go out for a long, boozy lunch every couple of months. The company paid for it (well, the food and some of the drinks). There was no expectation that any work would be done afterwards, of course, and there wasn’t actually a strict requirement to return to the workplace afterwards, although most did. Team building early 90s style. It worked too.
When I delivered pizza, various intoxicants were commonly shared before during and after shifts.
At closing, we would swap a couple of pies for a gallon of daiquiris from a nearby business.
Also did roadie type stuff for several local bands that gigged at bars, sooo…yeah.
Later, in the Air Force, we had a bar in my squadron. Only served beer, but it had a pinball machine and a dart board. Party every Friday afternoon after the safety meeting.
Oddly enough, after I became a lawyer, drinking at work almost never happens…I’m self-employed, so I could, theoretically, indulge at work, but I don’t. Never know when a client may show up or I may get called to court on an emergency.
Same here. Since I went full time that is. Maintenance in heavy industry. Never understood the people that showed up hungover or stopped by their car in the parking lot for a refresher. Now, any slight accident or injury is an automatic blood test. Denial of workman’s comp and immediate firing if anything found. Zero tolerance means zero point zero blood level and zero ppm.
A few years ago, I worked for a French company. I’d get “summoned” to their main office (northern France) periodically for “group meetings”. Mostly engineering managers from their various divisions. Anyway, they would cater lunch during the meetings, typically a week, and every lunch would include a small bottle of wine (250ml). My division president joined us on more than one occasion. Well, back in Houston, our HR director was leaving and saw a bunch of the hourly workers standing around under a viaduct drinking beer (off company property, on their own time). She made a big stink about it, saying it didn’t look good for the company. She even stated that if the division president was there, he wouldn’t like it. Before I got a chance to say anything, someone else told her she was wrong, that the president would most likely have wanted to join them.
Heh. I currently work at a homebrew supply store.
So, yeah.
But, homebrew isn’t really drinking.
Anyway, they are only tastes, not like I drinking a full beer or anything.
I’m not a drinker but back when I was a resident in the early 1990’s the tradition was that if a medical student did a spinal tap with no red blood cells (a so-called “champagne tap”) the resident owed them a bottle of wine or champagne. I had three students and one of them did a “champagne tap” during our month (the other two didn’t do as well-I told them that they were getting rose and burgundy respectively). In any case, our last night on call, I brought in a bottle of wine. I think we were on “short call” which means we didn’t have any admissions after 8 PM but still had to be there all night. In any case, we couldn’t find a corkscrew and we eventually resorted to taking a 60 cc syringe, sticking the needle through the cork, withdrawing wine and injecting it into cups. I don’t remember if I had any but the students definitely did. It certainly couldn’t have impaired me more than the first time I worked 36 hours straight without sleep and couldn’t even find the call room because I was so out of it. I certainly would never try the same stunt today, though.
A couple jobs over the years, now and then. Mostly for coughing (it really helps me) or after a day on the streams guiding a client; if he was having a drink then so was I. I remember when I was teaching elementary school and some of the others kept a bottle of vodka stashed in the lounge but I never quite went to that method. I was more black coffee and Camel straights.
One summer–2005, I think–I put in an application at a temp agency, and they liked me so much that they placed me temping at the front desk of the temp agency. I temped for temps.
It was a weird job. People who apply at temp agencies run the gamut, man.
I was only there for a couple of months, so I was only there for a single staff meeting. Before it began, one of the secretaries asked me if I wanted a strawberry daiquiri. “Uh, no thanks?” I said, kind of weirded out. But when I got to the meeting, everyone had them, and when she re-offered, I accepted. Rummy goodness :).
Other than that, I’ve only drunk at work functions, like fundraisers for a non-profit (which was another weird goddamned mess), or a celebration of folks who received a particular grant for schools (the person who organized it kept pressing drink tickets on us).
Drinking at an elementary school, even after kids are gone, is as verboten as it is tempting.
My first boss was a drinker, and the office culture involved a lot of alcohol. Not if you were sitting at your desk and working, but at lunches and dinners in honor of someone or some occasion (at least twice a week, sometimes more) and Fridays around 3, the bar in the office was open. That was when work would be talked about in a more philosophical sense – musing on future projects, new ideas, etc. – over A LOT of booze. Anyone who wanted to drink and talk was welcome. It wasn’t until much later that I learned some people who didn’t care to drink resented this.
About 10 years of this, and my boss retired and I got a new boss. New boss doesn’t drink at all, there isn’t any particular reason I’m aware of, he simply never got into the habit. By then, I was smart enough to know that if my boss doesn’t drink, then I don’t drink (at work). We’ll still have beer and wine available at the holiday party, and maybe if someone retires, but at this point, I don’t even bother – I can drink perfectly fine on my own time.
I gave a talk in England last year and my host (graduate student) invited me to lunch before hand at the student cafeteria. My talk was at 1:30 and we were eating at about noon. She asked me what I wanted: “uh,…beer? wine?” I must have looked a bit goggle eyed before saying, “uh no, coffee would be great”. England is definitely a…different…drinking culture than America.
That being said, I sometimes do work from home after hours, and I might have a drink or two then. I’m pretty sure I’ve occasionally started fieldwork on a Saturday morning with some alcohol in my system from the night before. (Not during a week day, obviously).
Not at work, but back in the late 80s and 90s, we would go to a Mexican restaurant on payday Fridays. We’d sit in the bar where they served STRONG Margaritas and awesome quesadillas. Some afternoons, I’d just sit at my desk in a stupor until time to go home.
In the 70s, I worked at the old Petroleum Building (it had the big 76 ball painted on the side visible from the Harbor freeway) in downtown L.A. One of our managers would go down to the bar in the Holiday Inn next door and drink until the traffic cleared. He somehow always made it home. Different times.
Ever drank at work? Ha ha. I was working in Japan at the height of The Bubble. In something which makes absolutely no business sense, customers would pay for the dinners and drinks at times.
Most of the time it was after work hours, but we would have beer or wine with lunch at times. People would begin celebrations early. One assignment I had in the Philippines with Japanese clients involved a lunch with more beer than rice. No meaningful work was done.
Trade shows used to have more alcohol. Since many people were staying at local hotels, then it didn’t matter if you drank or not. After about 4:00, then the beer would flow.
(Not business hours, but entertainment is centered around drinking, of course. Dinner and drinks with Japanese clients were often a blur with a taxi ride home. More people used to drink during golf outings with clients, but they sensibly changed the laws to make everyone in the car culpable if the driver was impaired. This cut down on the amount of pressure bosses could exert on subordinates to drink and then drive everyone home.)
The only time I had to just bail was going with an American client to a Superbowl party, shown live at a sports bar early Monday morning. Drinking too much at 8:00 in the morning was too much and I slept it off at home. There were advantages of being the boss.
Of course, I grew to like alcohol a bit too much and the rest wasn’t nearly as fun of a story.
When I worked, volunteered actually, in college radio, there was a lot of booze and other substances greasing the skids. As a professional, the O’Connor Trading partners in Chicago had free booze. The only rule was “not during trading hours”. The closing bell would ring, you’d go grab a cold one or three, and then start doing your paperwork and settling trades.
Define “at work.” At academic conferences, sure, it’s practically obligatory. While grading / doing class prep / doing work-related writing at home, often, though never more than a beer or two. Very occasionally during class on study-abroad trips in a country where it’s customary to hold class in the pub. Definitely not in my office or anywhere on my home campus, however, except at the occasional reception or alumni event.
Yes, but only at offices where it was acceptable. As in, you show up at 9am the day after Thanksgiving, because you don’t want to burn a vacation day, and as you walk in the door your boss, who also didn’t want to burn a vacation day, asks you whether you would like a mimosa or just a plain glass of champagne. Let’s just say, they might as well have given you the day off with pay.
I never worked anywhere where you could get fired for having a drink with lunch, but obviously, if someone was drunk all the time, that could have been a problem. This was even true when I worked for a hospital, except that I worked in the administrative officer, so not with doctors and nurses, who probably shouldn’t have a drink or two with lunch, for sure. But the hospital president did.
Every newspaper I ever worked for was close to a bar, and in most cases the bar became kind of an adjunct office. I think those days are a thing of the past, along with all the newspapers.
Oh, yes. There was a period of time twelve or so years ago when I’d offer everyone drinks on Friday an hour or two before the end of the day. It kind of got out of hand, with some people over consuming. Then someone pointed out that one of the biggest drinkers was only 20. Sadly, I stopped the happy hour.
