I don’t think the OP was very out of line, and it sounds like his co-worker is just being a bitch. Where I work, at least once a month, the company buys drinks for the entire office. Sometimes it’s at one of the bars across the street, sometimes its a washbucket filled with ice and brewskis in the large conference room. Its usually in the afternoon, but about half the people go back to work afterwards because they’re trying to make a deadline or are on overtime or something. And I know from friends in the industry that it used to be a lot wilder back in the '90s. We’re talking “mounds of cocaine” wilder.
Did I mention that one of the owners used to own a sports bar that went under, and had the entire bar (plasma screens, wall effects and including the full bar that one of the employees tends on Fridays after work) moved into the breakroom?
I think we’ve veered off the subject, which is dmatch’s ire at some buttinsky bitch tattling like a fucking third grader. I think he’s outlined his office’s stance on drinking pretty well, and it’s possible that he got “called on the carpet” for show; maybe even for the bitch’s benefit. We’re not talking about the what ifs and potential problems of this kind of conduct in a hospital, prison ward, transit authority or plutonium tasting lab. His beef / question is what the hell is up with someone sticking their nose into a situation in which it doesn’t belong. I say it’s utterly uncool. All the way. For those of you playing the safety card, what if she’d narced him out about something else, say, taking too long of a lunch or making long distance calls on the companies dime? The nature of the so-called infraction aside, how many of you think it’s cool, in principle, to narc on someone?
Wow dmatsch, been here all of a couple of months and you already know all about QTM from reading his other threads. Hmmm.
As to how much time I post, doesn’t really matter since I run my own company. I have a few employees, and have occasionally provided alcohol at lunch. But if one of them imbibed on their own initiative I would at least let them know that it is not acceptable. You and they are hourly employees that means that I and your employer pay you to do a certain task for a certain amount of time. Since I am paying I can decide that alcohol may be consumed, niether you nor my employees can make that decision. You don’t like it you are free to leave.
Furthermore, if more than 15 minutes had passed, that was not just alcohol on your breath, that was alcohol coming out of your blood through respiration. That means that not an insignificant amount had been absorbed into your system.
As fo4r keeping things civil, just how civil do you consider making fun of the obvious typo “throow”. Now fuck off and get thee to an AA meeting.
You may think that sounds reasonable but it isn’t always. Salaried professionals can often be in a position where they are called into pressing service 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. That would mean that all behavior is subject to employer approval and puts one in true slave mode.
This isn’t theoretical, it has happened to me. When you work in higher level IT and you want to break it down by “my time” and “your own time” the whole concept fails miserably. It is just a set of loose guidelines to get what needs to be done accomplished under many circumstances even if the employee has to work 72 hours straight. This is a stupid place for hard rules. There wasn’t an Absolute bottle in the cockpit of a 747.
Not everyone gets their schedule on a neat little time-card for reference during the week. I worked coding 72 hours straight last December and the intellectual skill always at a much higher level that most other people’s jobs are on the hardest day and yet I was seeing the clock spin to 3 am yet again, trying not to not to puke because of lack of sleep (always fails), work for 4 more hours and then get dresses and go back to work. That is a common theme with the stuff I work on and it sounds similar to the OP’s situation so I fail to see how 1:00 pm on say a Tuesday is any more the “employer’s time” than 4:00 am on a Sunday morning. I slept for 20 hours after that. I just never care whether I have my shoes on or what is going on in the external world. You just fade in and out at the task at hand and busybodies who are more like squirrels moving to a feeder using only the sun, sometimes encounter errors in their tiny little brain because everyone isn’t like their tall-haired, predictable, boring, and primitive brained soul.
I think some of you are thinking more about coming to a shift-type job high rather than something that is 24/7/365 and causes night to become day and Friday to be indistinguishable from Monday. In those cases, you can encounter a position where all time is “employer time” if they need it and you can never mark any as yours.
What are you implying, he already apologized and I think you misread his posts.
He was making assumptions based on QtM’s posts in this thread is how I read it.
He is in all likelihood a Salary employee, most Programmers are. Those 16 hour days pay the same as an 8 hour day.
No, it isn’t, you’re right. I had an entirely different image.
As for my two cents, if someone was stealing something major from the office I still don’t know if I’d say anything. Even when a girl was doing a horrible job and had a personal grudge against me and I caught her stealing I didn’t say anything. Of course, they might not have believed me because they knew she had this grudge against me, but still.
Drinking? At lunch? When you’re away? That’s not violating any rules, I think. If you came back and were falling down drunk on the job repeatedly, and it was affecting my work (as in, I needed to get things from you, say, to do my job), maybe I might drop a hint or two to the boss: So-and-so doesn’t get me my reports (or whatever) on time, and let them follow from there.
It’s none of my business. I don’t get paid enough nor do I want that much responsibility to rat other people out.
To dmatsch:
When confronted with the news that a coworker smelled alcohol, did you admit that you did?
As the accusation came a day later, I would have denied, denied, denied that I had drinks at lunch. It’s your word against the snitch’s (unless there were witnesses that would corroborate.)
Given that you do work in a relaxed, non-life threatening, non-motor-vehicle driving, non-heavy-machinery-operating environment, and that drinking at lunch had been practised among other coworkers/supervisors previously, I can’t fault you at all.
It’s not like you’re going to poke somebody’s eye out with a sharp piece of code…
Nobody (that I know of) has a written policy of allowing alcohol consumption. Some bosses allow it in moderation.
Do you know, for a long time, my boss allowed beer in the fridge at work? And wine coolers, since I don’t drink beer? We work salary, for little pay and very long hours. It was a tacit understanding, that we do not get drunk, or even tipsy, we don’t rat each other out, and we’re allowed to have this little lift.
When one person goes and whines to management about minor things it ruins it for everyone.
blah, blah, blah… ohh your life is so hard and you’re such a genius compared to everyone else, you work soooo hard… :rolleyes:
Whatever, dude. None of that really applies to the situation described in the OP. He was at the office. He was clearly not on his own time. And he got caught out.
Oh yeah, before I forget: it’s different if the boss is buying the drinks. That’s his prerogative.
Also, this thread has gone on long enough that it should be noted that denial is a part of alcoholism, and vociferously arguing in favor of drinking on the job makes me wonder just why it’s so important to some people.
I’m not saying that this is true of dmatsch or of anyone else here, but having known more than a handful of alcoholics, I’m just saying that I do notice when people argue forcefully in favor of how drinking is “no big deal” (or words to that effect), and I wonder just why it’s so important to them.