my office loves to drink, and I’m trying to stop drinking

A reader writes:

My workplace has drinking heavily interwoven into the culture. You doubtless know the kind of place — never had a work social event without copious amounts of booze, boss bringing around beers on Friday afternoons, work parties with an open bar being relocated to another bar where the limitless company tab covers five shots for everyone at the table in five minutes, that kind of vibe.

I didn’t know that was the culture when I was applying, and I’ve had a lot of issues with alcohol and drugs in the past. Over the past year and a half, I’ve had some life stuff going on that meant I got to the point where I felt it would be good for me to cut out drinking, and oh my god I did not foresee “the receptionist is having a Pepsi with no rum in it” to be the apparently catastrophic event it seems to be.

Apparently I’m fun when I’m drinking (yeah, I am, until I’m stumbling home throwing up and sobbing at 3 am) and I have a unique ability to keep the party going (not a good thing in my case!) so whenever I’m at any work social event, the pressure is constant, especially from a few of my bosses. No thanks? Oh, come on! I’ve been trying to cut back? It’s just one, on a special occasion! I have to work tomorrow? Oh, it’ll be fine, we’ll be okay if you’re a few hours late tomorrow if you go too hard!

And so on and so forth, to the point where once my boss at a party, after being told I wasn’t drinking this time, handed me a glass of what I thought was ginger ale but turned out to be a dark and stormy, because “I know you like them!” Another has told me after a few drinks, probably joking but still, that they hired me for my personality, so I have to go to the bar after with everyone and if I don’t, it’ll come up at my performance review. Even if I drove, they don’t reliably accept when other people say they can’t drink because they’re driving — or, on one occasion I can remember, pregnant.

We don’t have HR — after they abruptly fired the HR guy, they decided to split up his duties between four of my bosses, most of whom are on the drink-pushing side of the equation. I would really like to have my “no thanks” respected, but I’m hesitant to go into my issues with my bosses because from what I’ve seen so far, it probably won’t help. Any suggestions, besides doubling down on the old job hunt?

In an ideal world, you’d talk to your bosses and point out that the drinking-heavy culture is really problematic for a whole range of people — people in recovery, people who are pregnant or on medications where they can’t drink, people who don’t drink for religious reasons, and people who just plain don’t drink or don’t feeling like drinking at the moment. And in that ideal world, your bosses would then address it on two fronts: (1) having a zero-tolerance policy for pressuring anyone to drink and (2) reconsidering how heavily alcohol features in their work events in the first place.

But it doesn’t sound like you’re in that ideal world. Any chance, though, that it’s worth a conversation anyway? Is there a manager who you’d be comfortable pointing out the above to, possibly (although not necessarily) paired with an explanation that you’ve stopped drinking and the pressure has become a problem? (You don’t need to disclose that about yourself, but if you’re comfortable doing it, it might help them take the conversation more seriously.) You could also point out the legal liability for the company when “I’m driving” isn’t immediately understood as a reason not to drink.

If not, or if that doesn’t work, then — short of finding a new job — all you can really do is limit your exposure to these events (hard to do when they’re in the office during work hours) and tell people to stop when they’re trying to get you to drink. Feel free to say, “No, and it’s weird to push people to drink; you don’t know what their reasons for not drinking might be.”

If you find that easy to do, then great; that might be all you need. But if you find that hard to do, and as a result you’re making decisions you don’t want to make (like drinking when you’re trying not to), that’s a sign that this is really not a culture you should stay in. It’s easier said than done to find a new job, especially if you’re otherwise happy with this one, but at that point that would be the right move.

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