Having a BAC of 0.02 is very, very far from intoxicated.
Maybe Louisiana and possibly Las Vegas
THIS is why he was tested. No unemployment for you.
Protected classes are typically minorities. I think the sober people are the protected class there.
But you can still be impaired.
One 12 oz beer (5%) will put me at .02 and I can feel the effects. I would be unsafe driving or working machinery. Not so much standard situations but my reflexes are noticeably slowed and I would have a poor response to an emergency.
I really mean no offense, since I don’t know the OP at all.
BUT, I suspect an employee in good standing with the powers that be would not have been taken to task quite so quickly. For that matter, I have always had the sort of relationship with my coworkers where they would’ve told ME “you stink, dude. Go home sick before the boss finds out” I suspect that the rapid progression of events tells a tale in itself.
If I lost my job every time I came in to work hungover . . .
Agreed.
This, on the other hand, is probably not unreasonable.
I, on the other hand, am like Dr. Johnny Fever: my performance improves!
If one has imbibed enough all that will serve to do is make the smell of alcohol stand out more against all the artificial, perfume-y scents. We tend to “sweat” it out of our pores, especially the next day. You could add “eating a huge meal, going for a long run, and downing 3 cups of coffee” to the start of that list and still not have a chance.
Anecdotal, I know, but here goes… I’ve had times where I hadn’t had a drink for a full day or two, and my wife has asked me “have you had anything to drink today?”
My father smells faintly of beer even without drinking for a couple days. He drinks 3 beers and two glasses of wine most every day. “You are what you eat” and all that jazz.
LOL and I can do a demerol with a strawberry daquerie back and pass a sobriety test [the whole pointy finger nose and the alphabet backwards ones. With the physical disabilities I haven’t been able to do the walk a straight line since about 1980.]
Some people have a lot of alcohol tolerance, others are lightweights. mrAru is totally hammered to the point of dozing on 3 5% beers. I can do 3 shots of vodka and respond as sober. <shrug> everybody is different.
My WAG…
The OP is a screw-up on the job. He has had ‘issues’ before, either with attitude, tardiness, absenteeism, poor work, or some combination. His firing is not based solely on this incident.
Why would I think that? Well, if he were a valued employee and this happened out of the blue, he would have been instructed to go home and take a personal day. Turnover costs are bad for business. Lost work, the trouble of searching for a replacement, then training… nobody wants to do this. I would venture to say this was ‘the straw that broke the camel’s back’.
That depends. There’s a lot more to impairment than blood-alcohol level. Everyone reacts differently to intoxicants and one guy with a 0.02 may show no impairment while another may be dangerous. It is reasonable for an employer to have a zero-tolerance impairment policy for people who work with or near large equipment, vehicles, or other dangerous items.
The OP doesn’t, though.
We can’t convict him of driving over the DUI limit by the standard of beyond a reasonable doubt. So no criminal conviction here.
But alcohol interfered with his ability to hold a job. He needs help. I urge the OP to stop drinking and go to a meeting of AA. No drinks that have ethanol. Wine counts as booze.
This thread makes me suspect that my plan to turn krausen into men’s aftershave is a futile effort!
But, he had a reason to celebrate. We all seem to be overlooking that! [ah, for a good rolleyes smiley right now.]
I can tolerate narcotics really well. I can drive on the highway on lots of codeine, but 1/2 glass of wine, and I’m loopy. I can still touch my finger to my nose with my eyes closed, though. I can do that totally smashed. I’m not even sure why that’s a drunk test.
Yup. Which is why employers who have to worry about problems caused by impaired workers usually have a .000 policy. There’s no way to know who can run an obstacle course after six shots of vodka, and who starts putting on lampshades after one Woodchuck.
When I was a supervisor, I oversaw people who worked with a vulnerable population, people with all kinds of disabilities, some physical, some developmental, some people in fragile health. A lot of times the staff had to transport people, and quite a lot of the time, they had to pass meds; they also sometimes give injections, did tube feedings, and did other things with equipment, did therapy stretches with people, you get the idea. We had a stone cold sober policy. For me, every six weeks, I carried an emergency pager which meant that I might have to go an fill in for a staff person who got injured on the job, or was a no-call, no-show, or I might have to drive in to help with an emergency with a client. As a result, when I was on the pager, I was 0 alcohol, all week. That was no problem for me, as I’m not much of a drinker, and I go whole weeks (months, actually) without drinking anyway, but once in a while, we’d have someone come in to interview for a position like mine, who would balk at carrying the pager when they found out they couldn’t drink for a week. They wouldn’t get offered the job if they were obviously startled by that requirement, but I get the feeling they’d turn it down anyway.
Unless he’s an atheist.
Or not an alcoholic.
I find it bizarre how many people feel they can diagnose alcoholism based on a post of one incident without further information.
While I, too, suspect there is more to this than the OP has told us it is presumptuous to make a medical diagnosis over the internet based on little we actually know. We don’t know if he’s a “screw-up” on the job or if the company was looking for an excuse to reduce headcount. We don’t know if this is the first and only incident or one of many. He could be a raging alcoholic with a dozen DUI’s -OR- he could be someone with very little experience of alcohol (they do exist) and thus have little or no notion of his limits and how it affects him.
Barring new information, “urging” someone to declare themselves an alcoholic and go to AA is out of line in my point of view.
The only thing I feel I can recommend for this person is apply for UI (even if he’s unlikely to get it) and get a new job. I also hope he thinks about what else has been said in this thread but without more facts that’s all I feel I can do.