drinking on the job

I was once a waitress at a greasy spoon. This new cook came in, all in whites, with the big jiffy-Pope hat, to interview for this cruddy job. He got it. Later that night he was telling us all that he always wears whites "because I am fucking professional". He worked that phrase into everything, but he kinda mashed it, "I'm a fucka proffesnll".

Day two this guys stinks like vodka and he is flubbing around in the kitchen like he has no clue about food preparation. I told the boss the "fucking professional" was drunk and that he could not do his job and I was told "I don't care what this guy does on his own time".

Late that night I went into this little back room to get supplies and I found half a bottle of vodka stashed behind the bread. I went to show the boss, who was clearly upset but did not want to address it since we were slammed and this dude was the only cook.

Then right in the middle of the bar rush, that time of the night when the place was jam packed with drunken magic and pocket change, one of the waitresses comes running out of the kitchen screaming, "The cook chopped off his finger and blood went into the condiment tubs!!" Out comes the bloody professional, his whites all thrashed to hell. Every customer got up and left. We got to go home too. It was a sudden holiday.

In the UK, it is traditional to slope over the the nearest pub for a liquid lunch at least once a week. How much you consume depends really on whether you'll need to be sober to drive home later, and/or how much you hate your job. With this in mind, here is a little anecdote combined with a good, effective way to get drunk at work.

Back in the day, I was in training to work for a certain large telecommunications company in the UK. Unfortunately, the training program wouldn't have challenged a shaved monkey, so we whiled away our days in the training room doing the bare minimum demanded by the trainer, and playing Flash games on the training PCs.

This got boring too, so we started going over the road to the pub and knocking back as much Stella as we could in our lunch hour. This was great, until we got to about 3:30pm and hangovers kicked in (you have to keep drinking to keep your levels up, like Bender)

My solution was excellent, popular among my fellow inmates, and should serve you well.

How to drink at work

1. Buy a 500ml plastic bottle of Sprite or 7-up or whatever you like - make sure the soft drink you choose is the same colour as the liquor you enjoy so it doesn't look suspicious.
2. Drink some of the soft drink, to make room for the liquor.
3. Top up the bottle with the hard liquor. You now have a nice, inconspicuous bottle of mixer. We passed this around during our fag break and found that we survived past 5pm without a pounding head.

Caveats!

• DON'T make the drink too strong, as you'll either show obvious intoxication, or start to smell of it.
• DO ensure your drink is the right colour for its bottle - don't put a whisky and Coke in a 7-up bottle.
• DON'T actually do this. You'll get caught, and get fired. That's assuming you don't cause some catastrophe by crashing your crane/train/nuclear reactor control system first. Remember the Exxon Valdez.

rootbeer277 points out that homeless people have been doing this for years to get around public consumption laws where applicable. Could it be they got there in the first place by having a crafty Archers and lemonade at work?