A Practical Guide to Drinking at Work

Spending eight hours in a jail cell-like cubicle five days per week is enough to crush even the mightiest of souls.  The work you do is boring as all hell, the people you work with are obnoxious and your boss is a dunderheaded jackass.  It’s enough to make a person want to devote their life to homelessness and drug abuse.  Sure, sleeping on the streets and earning drug money by participating in bum fights would suck, but at least you’d never have to attach a cover sheet to your TPS report ever again.  It’s a decent trade off.  But there’s no need to take such drastic measures.  When the daily grind gets to be too much to take, don’t act on those workplace shooting day dreams you’ve been having.  Instead, just get hammered.  Seriously, booze makes just about anything except clinical depression far more enjoyable.  But be careful, if you get sloppy about it, you will get caught.  Here are some helful tips to guide you through a drunken day on the job.

1. Plan Ahead

A task like this is going to take some forethought.  You don’t just want to show up with a cache of booze on a whim and immediately take to pounding.  That is a recipe for disaster.  Ideally, you’re going to want to pick a day when you have absolutely nothing to do except work.  Check your calendar.  Do you have a meeting tomorrow?  Well, then tomorrow is not the day for you.  The last thing you need is to be sitting in close quarters with a bunch of looky-loos hanging on your every slurred word.  For maximum results, pick a day when a bunch of people are on vacation.  Not only will this provide you with less of an audience, but nobody schedules meetings when people are out of the office en masse.  Their ego will not permit them to have their Six Sigma presentation fall on the unattentive ears of a half empty meeting room.  And for the love of god, when you get to work, stay at your desk as much as possible.  This is no time for hallway chit chat.  When you do have to leave your desk carry a piece of paper and walk fast.  You’ll look busy, nobody will bother you.

2. Drink Vodka

When you absolutely, positively must fool every motherfucker in the room, vodka is your go-to drink.  This is no time to be a finnicky drinker.  Even if Thunderbird fortified wine is normally your hooch of choice, for today, you’re just going to have to stoop to vodka.  Sure, it still has a bit of a scent, but it’s the most easily concealed alcohol scent there is.  We’ll get into how to conceal that scent later.

3. Flasks Are For Suckers

It should go without saying that bringing a flask to work is a horrible idea.  It’s just basic Murphy’s Law.  You know Murphy’s Law, right?  It’s that law that says whatever bad can happen, like, um, will and stuff.  And then your flask will fall out of your pocket in plain view of the entire office.  And then you’ll get crabs.  We’re pretty sure that’s the law, verbatim.  Anyway, since you’re drinking vodka, just put it in a water bottle.  No need to get flashy, 007.

4. Skip the Mints

Exuberantly minty breath is a dead give away that shenanigans are afoot.  Nobody walks around popping Listerine strength breathmints all day long unless they have something to hide.  Unless you have chronic halitosis, the newfound curiously strong scent coming from your piehole is going to get people talking.  Once that happens, it’s all over.  Instead, to take the faint vodka scent off your breath opt for one of those crazy hybrid fruit gums that are all the rage these days.  For all anyone knows, maybe Passion Fruit Acai Pomegranate Blueberry Blast really does smelly oddly like alcohol.  For extra defense, eat something onion and garlic-y for lunch.  You’ll have the dragon breath (and probably explosive diarrhea) for the remainder of the day, but at least you can keep drinking under the radar.

5. Use Lots of Hand Sanitizer

Try as you might to dodge your co-workers all day, it’s a given that at some point, someone will come bounding into your cubicle to ask if you got that memo or if you know what you’re bringing to the potluck to celebrate Lola’s shitty new grandkid or something.  This is a problem.  No matter how well you conceal the booze stink from your breath, it doesn’t change the fact that you’ve spent the last six hours mixing vodka and Sprite at your desk.  There will be an odd odor in the air.  The kind of odd odor that would probably result in a fireball of Michael Bay proportions if someone were to light a match in your cubicle.  But fear not, you can get around that.  If someone invades your space, just casually reach for a bottle of hand sanitizer and freshen up your arthritic hands.  This shit is made from alcohol.  It smells more like booze than most booze does.  They’ll think nothing of it.

If the same person comes to your desk repeatedly and has the gall to ask why you keep sanitizing your hands every time they stop by, just keep your cool and say something innocuous like “maybe I think you have scabies, did you ever think of that!”.  At this point, it might not be a bad idea to also drop your pants and start fondling your package.  Because let’s be honest, if you’re getting plastered at work, you’re secretly hoping you will get fired anyway.  After several hours of drunken data entry, you may just finally have the courage to make it happen.