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?