My first observation of alcohol in the workplace occurred in 1990 when I was working for a British insurance company. I was posted to a small department in an obscure office just outside London. We shared the floor with thecompany’s internal audit team. In the accountancy world, internal audit are the Darth Vaders of finance and we traditional bean counters look on them with the same mixture of pity and contempt that the rest of the world reserves for us bean counters.
At Christmas however, this team of cardigan wearing, be speckled nerds would come alive. The company had a policy of no alcohol on the premises and this was enforced by the internal audit team who would visit branch officesand search manager’s desk drawers for that bottle of scotch which they kept to entertain clients. This would be duly confiscated and retained in a safe place back at base to be brought out at the annual internal audit Christmas party.
Our small team always got an invite to this event, which was hardly a gag fest but did involve lots of free booze. I was troubled by the hypocrisy of their actions and was often tempted to quote that Latin phrase Quis custodietipsos custodes? (who will guard the guards?) to demonstrate my smart arsed grasp of obscure quotes and my sense of probity.
But discretion is always the better side of valour and I kept my mouth closed, apart from opening it every 30 seconds to pore in some free whiskey.
That was my last sight of alcohol in the workplace, until I arrived in Australia in 2007. At 4pm on my first Friday at work here I noticed that a lot of staff got up and walked to a corner of the office. I followed them andfound a small trolley with 24 beers and two bottles of wine. I discovered that this was a weekly event and was designed to give staff a feeling that the week was over and to provide a chance to stand and chat.
There were about 90 people on our floor at the time and I was worried that I might be trampled in the rush. To my amazement, this never happened and on occasion, I’ve been able to account for 6 of the 24 beers available. Staffare mainly interested in the free crisps that are also provided and many of them would fashion origami influenced paper structures to better transport the mountain of crisps collected back to their desk. I’ve often thought that it would be an interesting sociologicalstudy to compare this behaviour to that found in Ireland. I’d guess that if a beer trolley was brought out each week in a Dublin office, it wouldn’t survive the first visitor who would pocket all the alcohol available in every free orifice.
Sadly, this free beer came to an end two weeks ago in the latest round of expense cuts to hit the Financial Services industry. We bankers might have destroyed the world economy, but that’s no reason to take away our free grog.
There are some people here who naively believe that the beer trolley will return when the good times are rolling again. But I’m an old salt and I know that once things go, they never come back. Back in 1980, I was the victimof bullying by a boy called McNally, who was in my class. He had an issue with my older brother but found it easier to take out his frustrations on me. One lunchtime I was cycling home for dinner (we had our dinner at lunchtime but that’s a subject for anothersociological study). As I was freewheeling down the hill from school, McNally stepped out and pushed me off my bike. Tears flowed and to my eternal shame I took no action other than blubbing out the sad tale to my unsympathetic mother, who was more concernedwith the cost of repairing my torn uniform.
My brother sat listening but didn’t say a word. That afternoon, we retired to the library for supervised after school study. This ran from 4pm to 6pm with a ten minute break at 5pm when the supervising teacher would sneakout for a cigarette or a nip from his hip flask. On this particular day, I was drawn to a commotion in the toilets during the break. Pushing my way to the front I found my brother holding McNally’s head in a toilet bowl and flushing regularly. This had a similareffect to the water boarding activities used in Iraq by the CIA and led McNally to offer fulsome apologies for his actions.
The teacher eventually intervened, but by the time he had pushed his way through the baying crowd, all he found was a prostrated McNally doing an impression of a drowned rat. Needless to say, he didn’t dob in my brother. Ourschool ran an honour system that would have made the Sicilian mafia jealous. But the headmaster was upset and ordered that the 10 minute break during study should be suspended until we learned how to control ourselves.
That was in 1980. My nephew now attends the same school and stays back for after school study. Last July, I asked him if they got a break at 5pm each evening and he looked at me blankly. Thirty two generations of boys havepassed through that school, oblivious to the fact that would get a ten minute break each day if it wasn’t for my brother’s torture techniques.
So it will be with the beer trolley. Future generations of Australians will never even know that free beer was once available on Fridays. As a new Dad, I’ve had to stop going out at night because of bathing and bedding responsibilities.As a result, drinking at work was my only avenue to alcohol. Desperate measures are called for. It’s time I got my CV up to date and started looking for positions in internal audit.
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