Well, am I wrong?
Please tell me I am being wooshed here.
Is it your contention that a single incident indicates a problem?
I don’t drink much, whether by volume or frequency. Once, in Germany for work, we had a very successful day where the team really knocked it out of the park. We were all on cloud nine and the German hosts took the team out for dinner. Being German, they made sure the beer kept flowing. THEN they started ordering Schnapps. I went as slow as I could, but by the time we left that evening, I was pretty drunk (they pressure you by not ordering a round until everyone is ready for the next… evil Germans). Nothing untoward happened that evening, we all behaved.
The next morning, back at the German plant, we probably all had BAC >0.
That kind of drinking (for me) has probably only happened once in the last 20 years.
Does that make me (and all my colleagues) alcoholics?
The memory is a funny thing! I read the OP and thought, who would do that, how irresponsible. Then I remembered my early days right out of college when I drank at a work function on a Sunday and came in sick on Monday. Of course everyone knew what had happened and so I couldn’t even BS what the problem was. I even threw up in a company trash can! :smack: It was almost 30 years ago and I have been much better since!
I don’t know.
**Are you a:
- medical or mental health professional qualified to diagnose substance abuse?
-AND-
- have you actually examined/interviewed this person in real life?**
Unless the answer to both of those questions is “Yes” you are not qualified to render a diagnosis in this case. Note that the actual medical professionals on the Dope NEVER diagnose over the internet. They will say “see a doctor” or “X might be a possibility - see someone in real life” or, in a few cases “GET TO AN EMERGENCY ROOM NOW!” But the real professionals don’t claim to know what is actually wrong with a person they haven’t met in real life, and certainly not based on a single post, thread, or particular incident.
Perhaps you should follow their example?
I’m a 31 year old young professional in a major city. If one instance of showing up to work a little groggy after over-indulging makes a person an alcoholic, nearly every single person I know must be an alcoholic.
From my understanding of the research, alcohol problems come on a sliding scale - like most things in life. Some people have no problems with alcohol, some have minor problems, some have moderate problems, and some have big problems. I believe the idea that there is no middle ground between “totally fine in all drinking circumstances” and “out of control alcoholic” isn’t very well supported.
Truly spoken like someone who works with convicts all day. 
Missed the edit window:
What I find most objectionable about The Second Stone’s “diagnosis” is that that is exactly what it is: X happened therefore the OP is alcoholic. If The Second Stone had something more like “If you have a habit of going to work hung over or losing a job to hangovers you might have an alcohol problem and visiting AA could be a good idea if that’s the case” I wouldn’t take such an exception, because he’s giving warning signs of further trouble rather than making assumptions about someone he has never actually met.
Re-read the OP. The manager and he don’t get along. Why do you suppose that is? Could it be that this is a regular occurrence and there is friction over this issue? Probably. The manager is just doing his job. Yes, yes he is. They fired him before getting the test results back. This was the last straw.
Maybe the OP can enlighten us on how much and how regularly he drinks. I’d like him to do the best thing for himself. That may require confronting himself, that may involve not publishing it here on the board. But anyone who loses their job due to drinking, which this definitely is, should strongly consider that they may be an alcoholic. The OP’s health and well-being are at stake. Stop coddling him/her.
You guys are all kidding yourselves if you think that this was a one-off. It costs $25k to find an adequate replacement and businesses know that.
Everything you say is possible. It is also possible that this was the OP’s first experience with alcohol and didn’t know how to handle it. I don’t think that anyone is saying that it is inconceivable that he has a drinking problem, only that there isn’t near enough information to say. Even if you are vindicated by additional information, it will only be of guessing correctly.
And it is one hell of a leap to assume that the animosity between the OP and his boss is due to drinking. It could just as well be due to thousands of other things. Maybe the OP banged the boss’ wife. Maybe the OP is a pro-life and the boss pro-choice. Maybe the OP’s dog is continually shitting on his boss’ lawn. In fact, I can declare the dogshit reason as the reason with about the same level of surety as you can alcohol.
Yeah, the manager and he didn’t get along.
I once had a manager who didn’t like me from day one, tried to get me fired, we wound up in HR where she finally took an actual swing at me. The lawyers hustled her out of the room. Gone the next day.
Meanwhile, I went on to a lucrative decade plus with the same company.
Sometimes managers are dicks, this is news? As I said, we don’t know the full story. It sure seems to follow a common pattern but we don’t know that for certain.
Mind you, showing up under the influence can be a good reason for being fired, even if a one-time offense. There are certain jobs that are incompatible with substance use, even if it’s not abuse. I’m not entirely sure what the OP does for a living, so I’m not sure about that in this case, either.
This isn’t about me being “vindicated”. It’s about the OP never having this happen to him again. My “guess” that it is about drinking is because they said it was about drinking. There is no information on banging the manager’s wife. We know the only reason that the manager didn’t like him was because he came in hung over and smelling like a brewery. There is no evidence that dog shit ever came between him and his manager. The idea that this was the first drink the OP had ever had is without any evidence. The OP “celebrates” with alcohol. Enough that he has a .019 the morning of the next day by the time he gets to the hospital. Assuming at least six hours sleep and a full hour before the test at the hospital, that means he went to bed with a BAL of .14, and had enough familiarity with a hangover to gut it up and get to work, where a lightweight would have called in sick if the lightweight woke up at all in time to do that. And that .14 was at bedtime, figure another drink for every hour of partying.
Read the OP. Don’t find and make excuses for someone who lost his job due to drinking, suggest he get to a meeting or “atheist detox center”. All this, he might not have a drinking problem is bs. Someone who loses his job due to drinking, has a drinking problem. They need help. The OP might not be the worst alcoholic you’ve ever encountered, and in fact, I doubt he/she is. The worst alcoholic is going to die of alcohol very shortly. We’d like better for the OP.
Yes, if you lose your job to drinking you have a drinking problem… but that does not necessarily mean you’re an alcoholic by strict medical definition. At best it means you fucked up on one occasion, but you still fucked up. So the OP should learn from this experience. Don’t go to work hungover/under the influence. Whatever it takes to get to that state, whether it’s “gee, won’t do that ever again” or AA. But it’s up to the OP and whatever professionals that might get involved to make that determination, not a stranger on the internet.
Like I said, damn few of us are perfect. We’ve all screwed up at some point, and it’s not always because of a chronic problem or disease… though sometimes it is. As an outsider I try not to get too judgmental about someone else’s life I learn about through a few written paragraphs. I do urge people not to repeat obvious mistakes.
The idea that he had ever had a drink before in his life is supported by exactly as much evidence–i.e., none.
Yes, read the OP. The alcohol was given as the reason for dismissal, but it does not follow that it necessarily was the reason.
Based on what we know at this point, it is just as likely that the boss had it in for him for something utterly unrelated to his drinking, and saw the booze as a nice convenient excuse to get rid of somebody without fear of increasing unemployment premiums or claims of discrimination, or it may be part of some great game of office politics. The notion that all bosses are entirely rational and carefully consider the cost of replacing somebody is ludicrous.
Telling somebody they’re an alcoholic, when you have absolutely no idea of their drinking history or practices, is doing them no favors, and is certainly contrary to your stated claim of wanting better for the OP.
This is just silly. One need not be religious at all to find value in the “higher power” aspect of AA. That “higher power” could be just about anything the person chooses.
This is a possibility.
The problem here is that it was brought to the attention of management. That changes the dynamics of the situation. It’s one thing to corner someone discretely and tell them they look sick and to go home. It’s another thing to ignore a serious allegation.
I would be interested in the blood alcohol test. If that showed a lower number then and the op didn’t admit to drinking then I’d go with a bad night’s sleep and whatever OTC drug fits the narrative. Insert lawyer as needed.
Yup, in a lot of cases it is about controlling other people. And I don’t believe there is any evidence that “zero tolerance” workplaces have better safety records than other workplaces.
That being said, from the OP’s story it sounds likely that he has either an alcohol problem or some other performance issue. Yes, his boss may just be a dick who found an opportunity to get him fired. But that seems less likely.
no it isn’t. being a “drug free workplace” lowers insurance costs, so they piss test everybody.
If it’s in an industrial environment even if you are a PC jockey it’s pretty much zero tolerance. I’m in sales and we have beer in the work fridge left over from various functions where I work but no one would ever crack a beer before 5. It would be in extremely bad form as would coming to work “smelling like a brewery”. You would have to have been doing some absolutely epic drinking to be in that state coming into work.
It lowers insurance costs because there are laws in many states requiring an insurance discount for it. I am an actuary, and we once looked at our data to see how much of a discount we should give in states that didn’t have such a law. The data suggested that “drug free workplaces” actually had worse loss costs than other workplaces. Maybe that’s because places that had drug problems were more likely to have such a policy? We decided not to use that as a rating factor except where the law required it.
The lack of industry studies showing any savings for “drug free work places” suggests that any industry studies that have been done had similar results to ours.
[quote=“Hector_St_Clare, post:58, topic:715406”]
You need to move to a country with better labor laws.
Failing that, no I don’t think you have any recourse.
[/QUOTE ]
You haven’t moved to a less democratic country. Physician, heal thyself.