Un-Lubricated

Kim du Toit
March 26, 2005
1:51 PM CDT

The blogger known as The Englishman reminds my American Readers just why it is unwise to confront Brits in their place of business after lunch:

My dear boy - in England some of us still have a drink or two at lunch even on a working day. I know the last alcoholic drink during work in America was on 19th March 1987 but here we aren’t all Puritans. And mix a few pints with some Cockney Barrow Boys, sprinkle with Aggro and the fun starts.

I personally believe that when the Fall of American Civilization is chronicled by future historians, they will put its start date as March 19, 1987 (as per Tim).

Let me illustrate my point by telling a couple of stories about business and drinking.

Fresh out of the South African Army, I got a job in the Stat. Research Dept. of a Great Big Company, and on my very first day, I was taken out to lunch by my boss, the head of IT and the manager of Field Operations. Senior executives of the company (VP-level in U.S. terms), and lil’ ol’ me, the new kid in Stat. Clearly, they wanted to look me over.

The four of us sat down at a small table in a local pub, whereupon the IT guy (an Australian) looked at me closely, and asked,"What do you drink?”

“Errrrr Castle Lager?” I said nervously, naming the most popular brand of beer.

“Good choice,” he said, then turned to the waiter. ”Bring us sixteen Castles.”

I thought he was joking—but he wasn’t, and soon the small table was covered with a veritable forest of beer bottles.

“Won’t the beer get warm?” I asked.

“Nope,” came the answer. And it didn’t. My first afternoon at my new job was spent in a pleasant alcoholic haze, and was the first of many (oh so many).

Fast forward about ten years, when I joined the American parent company of the very same Great Big Company.

By Day 12, I was starting to feel paranoid—no one had invited me out to lunch, and in fact no one seemed to go out for lunch at all. Is it just me? I asked myself.

So in typical fashion, I suggested to the whole department that we go out to a local pub for a lunchtime drink. Had I suggested the same thing back in South Africa, I’d have had to limit the numbers. In the U.S.? Three people took up my invitation.

We got to a bar, and sat down. The waitress asked me what I’d like to drink. “I’d better start off slow,” I said, winking at her. “Bring me a couple of beers first—Michelob, I guess.”

Stunned silence from the others at the table. The waitress looked at them. “And for you guys?”

“Iced tea.”
“Iced tea.”
“Iced tea.”

I nearly fell out of my chair. “Errr, guys, if you’d wanted iced tea, we could have gone to the diner over the road,” I said.

“Oh no, we don’t drink booze during the day,” they all said, almost in unison.

Good grief. “How do you get through the afternoon?” I asked incredulously. They looked at me as though I was the Martian.

Even worse, I later discovered that absolutely no booze was allowed on the Company premises—this, after having worked in an area where every department had their own beer fridge, and where it was common to visit a coworker’s office to discuss a problem (after 5pm, of course), carrying two beers as a kind of peace offering / icebreaker. It’s really hard to get angry with someone when they’ve just given you a beer.

Let me be perfectly clear about all this.

I know that the fabled “three-martini lunch” has fallen into some disrepute in America, because of some Carry Nation notion that the Demon Drink affects work performance and is a personal risk not to mention insurance problem blah blah blah.

It’s all a load of crap.

Booze (consumed not to excess) functions as a social lubricant, as a conversation facilitator, and as a means whereby the shy can be emboldened. As such, I think it performs a magic task inside business life, and does something which no other substance or structure is able to.

I also think that in a business context, booze creates cameraderie, and a means whereby individuals can become actual friends with their coworkers—no doubt a taboo in most companies, where the worker bees are not supposed to actually enjoy their job, just to perform it according to the standards set down by some faceless (and no doubt sober) O&M / finance trolls from their sterile bunkers.

Needless to say, according to said trolls, the concept of people working together to help others do their jobs better is not something which should be done from friendship, but by corporate diktat. Personal friendships, in the Corporate World, are not good; because when the next round of layoffs occur, the serfs are more likely to be outraged when their best friend in IT gets axed than if it’s just some faceless guy they’ve never seen outside company email.

That’s American business, in a word: joyless. And the absense of booze helps make it so. (And let’s not hear about how American business is driving the world economy blah blah blah—the Brit business world is not exactly a basket case, and they seem to function quite well with the occasional or even frequent lunchtime pint. There is a happy medium between rampant alcoholism and cheerless Puritanism. More on this later.)

Oh, and by the way, I absolutely reject all the arguments of increased insurance liability and potential legal problems created by booze—I have no interest in the blatherings of insurance types and lawyers, because they’ve caused most of our Nanny-related problems anyway. The problems occur not with booze itself, but with the lack of personal restraint. And that’s something which is addressed by people acting like adults, not like children let loose in a candy store with $1,000 to spend.

Here’s part of the booze problem we face Over Here.

American beer is too weak, and American short drinks are served too strong.

The problem with weak beer is not its weakness per se, but the fact that you have to drink quite a bit of it to get a decent buzz—and the problem with drinking in quantity is that it’s really difficult to know when to stop once the old Alcohol Accelerator comes into play. I’d rather have a pint of Boddington’s Ale than four Michelobs (which are about equal in terms of buzz generation). The difference is that the former is, well, a pint; the latter is three pints. That’s a lot of liquid to drink, in a lunch hour, which means you have to drink it fast; whereas the Brit pint can be savored in a leisurely fashion, knowing that the destination will be the same.

The absolute reverse is true with short drinks—Scotch, gin, vodka and the like.

I’ll never forget the first time I ordered a Jack Daniels & Coke in America. I was, to put it mildly, a practiced drinker at the time: but a glass full of Jack served with a splash of Coke was too much, even for me. I had to ask for a glass of Coke on the side, with which I diluted the drink.

That’s no fun. One doesn’t drink to get drunk—we are not college students, after all, who are typically brainless fools regardless of nationality.

As an adult, one drinks to enjoy the taste of the booze, the feeling it produces, and the bonhomie which is shared with other drinkers.

Americans drink too quickly, and too heartily, to enjoy it. (The three-martini lunch, incidentally, should be a two-martini lunch, which is quite manageable, and will achieve the proper result. Three martinis, especially as served in those giant American bathtub-sized glasses, serve more as a social anesthetic than as a social lubricant.)

I hate watching American bartenders pour spirits—that freehand thing is quite off-putting, because if they “short” a drink, they may get yelled at by the customer, so the natural inclination is to over-pour the spirit, which means a hellishly-strong drink, which by its very nature, will get you wasted too soon.

How so? Because a “short” drink is really just a couple of mouthfuls, and can’t really be nursed over a long period of time (because the damn thing also gets diluted by the melting of the veritable Arctic ice cap in the glass—another of my pet peeves). And I don’t care about the drink being weakened—that’s actually a Good Thing—but the taste gets diluted, which isn’t.

That’s not the point of it all. I want America to follow the British model more closely when it comes to booze in the marketplace—a little of it goes a long way. And tot measures are a Good Thing, in this regard. Three “weaker” drinks consumed over an hour is a good time. One hellishly-strong drink with a progressively-worse taste consumed over the same time, isn’t.

Booze is not an “all or nothing” proposition, and it’s time we learned that.

Let me finish by returning to the Great Big Company (South African division). After a couple of years, management decided to have our own pub installed in the office. It was open only between 5pm and 7pm on Friday nights, and it was a place where people could socialize with their peers and with management. Very soon, it became clear that a huge amount of business was being discussed in the company pub, and productivity was increasing: fewer weekday meetings were necessary, problems were being ironed out over a drink instead of by memo, and the company actually became more of a fun place to work. (The staff retention rate, by the way, was incredible by American standards: something like 90%, and higher still if you excluded “forced” resignations caused by pregnancy and/or spousal relocation. The “returners”—people who’d quit, and then later rejoined—were also a large percentage of the workforce.)

Did people get drunk? Hell, yes. Did they drive home drunk? Regrettably, hell yes. If they’d had an accident, would they have sued the Company? Hell, no. We were all adults, and we all understood that overindulgence was the responsibility / fault of the drinker, not of the Company. (I know things have changed nowadays, which is another reason why I detest lawyers. But I digress.)

Things were a little different in the U.S. head office. One day, Sales invited a brewery client to lunch in the staff cafetaria (which was quite a posh place, incidentally—none of that industrial factory nonsense).

Because no booze was allowed on the premises, but the clients insisted on drinking beer with lunch (brewers, duh), company management was faced with a rock and a hard place.

The solution was to serve clients with beer, but only after surrounding the relevant dining area with temporary partitions. Couldn’t have the peasants see that beer was being served on the premises, after all—there might have been a rebellion.

Morons.

What we Americans need to do is grow up about the concept of booze. We don’t need to chug it down in vast quantities; we don’t need to over-indulge and become nasty, obnoxious people; and the sky will not fall because someone has beer on their breath after lunch.

And a pox on the insurance industry and tort litigation specialists, who’ve made our lives a little less enjoyable. They’ve created an environment where some asswipe can sue the company for damages just because he wrecked his car after drinking a case of beer at the Company picnic.

In my world, that mope would get a severe kick in the nads for being irresponsible—which is what the problem really is, despite what the tort lawyers might think.

But [sigh] this is after all the country where booze was once prohibited by Constitutional Amendment, so I’m not overly optimistic.

The hell with it. I think I’ll have a drink now.