My History of Workplace Drinking

I grew up in the 1970’s and my parents would regularly host cocktail parties, so alcohol was always around. As kids we would play under the card table that was the makeshift bar and I can remember all the laughter.  It was my earliest memory of associating alcohol with good times.

My first ever job in high school was at a supermarket and a few months after I started working there they got their liquor license and began selling beer and wine. This was before barcodes, and inventory was kept with a piece of cardboard and a pen.  I was friends with the meat department manager and he would scratch out some numbers, and grab a few 6 packs and we’d drink after work.  As a 16 year old new to employment my only experience was that work and alcohol went hand in hand.

In college I worked for construction company in the Boston area, and they built a lot of banks and churches. Mostly I was the grunt labor for a team of Italian masons and the job was physically demanding-- carrying brick and stone and bags of concrete.  Every day after work we’d hit the store to get a few 6 packs for the grueling drive home in bad traffic,  and I remember thinking that this huge dump truck could easily crush a car.  But my boss was a steady driver, and his motto was..”in this line of work you earned a few cold ones.”   I liked the buzz to take the edge off my sore muscles, but looking back I realize this was how I learned “entitlement drinking”… (I worked my ass off today, so I can drink as much as I want).

After getting my degree in Architecture, I was employed by several small firms, and it was very common to stay late into the evening to finish drawing the plans to meet a deadline. Once all the “brain work” was done like stair calculations and beam sizing etc., and all we had to do was draw lots of thin lines and thick lines we would bring in some beer and listen to music while we were cranking out the endless drawings. It definitely took the stress out of a deadline, and once again at a professional level I was associating work with alcohol and fun.  

Later in my career I got into sales and worked for a business newspaper selling advertising.  We always had beers on deadline day when we had to final proof all the ads.  It was common practice to do trades with local bars and restaurants and they would get, say $1000 in advertising, and we would get credit to take clients there.  At one point our publisher announced that they would no longer offer trades, and we had to run them down and have those advertisers pay for ads.  I remember that last month when we were on deadline, and there was one brew pub with credit left so we took the staff out to lunch….. But after the bill came there was still a credit of $100.  So to even it up they wheeled out a few cases of beer and said ”here ya go!”  When we got back to the office to do final proofs the Editor said “NOBODY LEAVES UNTIL ALL THIS BEER IS GONE.”   It actually was one of my all-time favorite jobs but it was weird to be told by your boss you had to stay and drink. 

I also worked in the tradeshow industry and software sales, and with all the travel and conventions, and the wining and dining that goes along with that it became a cultural and a career necessity to drink alcohol with clients and co-workers.   At many of these events you have regular sales guys like me and clients who expect a certain level of consumption, and at the other end of the spectrum you have some technical folks who may go to one conference a year and boy do they let loose away from home and family. Trust me when I tell you that you will find no richer breeding ground for overconsumption than at corporate trade shows and conferences. 

Fast forward to my current life here on Folly Beach, South Carolina just outside of Charleston where my wife and I own and operate 15 AirBnB beach vacation rentals. We started doing this in 2012 really before AirBnB was a big thing and so all we had was Craigslist and our own website.  In order to get good reviews on Google we would meet and greet and party with many of our guests so that they would have a good time.  And we just kept up this tradition as kind of a PR thing.   Again, alcohol just became part of the business model.   But after a decade on this slippery slope I finally realized I had a problem, and with the help of AA got sober for one year… and this began my journey of abstinence and then the re -entry to social drinking in MODERATION.