Drinking at work

no. work time is work time and drink time is drink time. but that's just me i guess.

plus, if i drink at work what would i look foreword to when work is done?

 

In general, I don't like drinking at work. (And I do work for a small ad agency/design firm). Every now and then we would meet in the conference room on a late Friday afternoon and have a beer, chat about the week, discuss new business opportunities. In that situation, a beer is good for morale, but only if I have all my work done.

If I'm trying to brainstorm new concepts or make changes to a website or if I'm working on deadline, a beer just gets in the way. I need focus and clarity to do my best work. Beer doesn't make me more creative. (Your mileage may vary.) I have plenty of habits/exercises I can rely on when I need to break through "designer's block." Beer/alcohol is not one of them, and likely never will be.

 

Friday afternoon bottle share is a weekly occurrence at my office. Everyone looks forward to it and at times, the anticipation gets the best of us and we crack the first bottle early afternoon. Makes for some interesting interactions when a customer happens to call later in the afternoon. With that said, my customers are brewers and winemakers so it's not unexpected, especially on Fridays.

 

I often enjoy a nice beverage at work...I keep a bottle of bourbon in my desk (used to be Elmer T. Lee until that got too hard to find, now it's Koval), and will get it out for our weekly Wednesday managers/directors meeting and pass it around the conference room. Everyone sips a finger or two over the two-hour meeting, and then the bottle goes back into my desk until the following week.

Sometimes (usually once or twice a week) when I'm at the nearby nice grocery store grabbing some soup or a sandwich or something for lunch, I'll decide I've got a taste for a nice beer, will pickup a 6-pack, and will have one with my lunch. I'll usually sip said beer over an hour or so. I always make it a point to encourage folks (especially our CEO and managing director) to help themselves.

I'm a manager at a small consulting firm where the average skews young (under 30), but many of us are closer to 40 (or 50) than we are to 30; we have a very strong, deeply-ingrained culture company in which alcohol, when kept in moderation, is just another beverage that is to be enjoyed responsibly. The cool thing is that this mindset carries over to holiday parties and happy hours...people have a couple drinks, but no one gets totally 'faced, and everyone has a nice, civilized time.

Last week I made a pick-6 from the grocery store, 3 Edmund Fitzgeralds and 3 Brown Shugga's. There should still be one or two Brown Shugga's left, if that's still the case tomorrow, I'll have one with lunch. I'd have one today, but after a weekend of holiday parties, I probably could go without the extra calories

 

I work for a beer distributor, so yes I get to drink at work. Usually on Fridays we open a couple special edition bottles and share them. Just the other day we opened up Saint Arnold Bishop's Barrel 1-6 and went down the line tasting.

 

I've known about the whole "couple drinks = +productivity" for awhile, and if I owned a business, I'd allow drinking on the job so long as it wasn't more than a couple drinks.

Personally, I get more motivation to do something when I have a little bit of a buzz, so the studies check out (in my case).

 

I used to do business with a marketing company that had a bar area in their office where employees would sometimes drink during the day. When I inquired about this the CEO said something like "we want to inspire their employees to be as creative and untethered as possible." I felt like it was their way of trying to be "hip" and "edgy" or something. Whether alcohol had anything to do with their number of employees recently going from 250 to 40, I really don't know.

Only drinking I've done on the job was while hanging out with clients at dinners, golf tournaments, etc but those weren't during normal business hours and just as much about friendship as business

 

About every other Friday, my boss and I head over to a local brewery and have lunch, but we just have one beer each with our meal.

 

I'd get FIRED! I guess you can't have a beer buzz at work when your clients are halfway shitfaced also.

 

Yes, please.

 

I know people who can make this work, not I. I get tired and honestly even two beers affects my judgement too much to work confidently.

 

For those people getting tired, you need to have a few jagerbombs. That should wake you up and help you keep your buzz.

Drinking at work for me wouldn't be any good. I would just be peeing every hour or so. That would get annoying fast.

 

I work for a company that barely even allows drinking at holiday parties. If there are kids at the party, no alcohol. If it is an adults only party, then drinks are served; but we usually only get two tickets to use...so two drinks. I usually go around and collect from the non-drinkers at the parties.

When my dad had his business, he kept a small beer fridge in the office area. Usually had some MGD in it, or something similar. No one was really allowed to drink during the day; but sometimes around 4:30 we would crack open a couple. It would have been too much of a liability to allow during the day with the warehouse (forklifts, equipment, etc.).

 

I've never worked for a company that allowed drinking on the job, but I've seen coworkers who still did it discreetly. If creativity is your duty, then I think a drink or two could be useful. It worked for Don Draper.

 

Google: Balmer Peak

That said, I work for a beer wholesaler and we are not allowed to drink on the job. Has a lot to do with sales reps going out and getting offers - or making offers - of free beers at all of the accounts. I just makes signs. Sometimes we will get to sample something in the office... well, I've worked here for over a year and that has happened once.

 

I work for myself. Sometimes a couple beers inspires me to keep working, other times, after the first beer is opened It's certain that nothing else is going to get done.

 

Wonder how productive I would be if I had a beer or two during the day? The kids already barely get dressed unless we have somewhere to go the way it is!

 

My girlfriend went to an ad agency the other day as part of her job that had a St. Archer and a Golden Road beer on draft in the lunch/break room. She sent me a phone pic since she didn't think I'd believe her.

 

Doing accounting consulting for publicly traded companies doesn't blend with drinking. Mainly because it'd be a serious napping hazard.

 

Oh, my memory was wrong. It was St. Archer and Green Flash. We won't mention the macro Euro lager in the pic...

Here it is.