Before we begin here, please queue up Toby Keith’s ‘Drinks After Work,’ the only appropriate song to listen to when discussing drinks after work.
Bros, is working for The Man* driving you to drink after work?
*Please note: Here, The Man constitutes the economic conditions of the late 20th and early 21st centuries that require a base level of cash flow to exist and function as a human. So the answer is yes. Yes, you work for The Man, even if you work for yourself and/or love your job.
It probably is. Working sucks. Doing work sucks. Drinking doesn’t suck. Which is why people do it after work. To stop the suck. And what profession is most likely to make you want, crave, desire, yearn for a beer afterward?
Well, some new government data now tells us what professions drive employees to drink and do drugs.
For alcohol, it’s hard labor. Miners and construction workers love to booze it up. From The Washington Post:
Eighteen ppercent of miners are “heavy drinkers,” defined here as “drinking five or more drinks on the same occasion (i.e., at the same time or within a couple of hours of each other) on 5 or more days in the past 30 days.” They’re followed by construction workers at 17 percent, and hotel and restaurant workers at 12 percent.
I used to work in the construction business and I was drunk and stoned all the time. I was 19-25, that was my excuse, but every middle aged man in it was an alcoholic with four DUIs.
As for drugs, it’s the servers slinging you your brunch hash. You, you, are causing them to toke up.
When it comes to drug use, on the other hand, those hotel and restaurant workers are the heaviest users, hands-down: 19 percent of them used an illicit drug in the past month. They’re followed by arts and entertainment workers at 14 percent and, perhaps surprisingly, managers at 12 percent.
Managers love cocaine. That’s how they manage effectively.
Of course, if you don’t work in any of those fields and have a drug or alcohol dependency, fret not. There’s nothing wrong with you. It’s just that you cultivated yours naturally, instead of relying on your career to be the stresor to bring you to whiskey and cocaine.
That’s good. That’s initiative.
Also, all our teachers are losers.
You might take some comfort knowing that your kids’ school teachers are among the least likely to be heavy drinkers or drug users: only 5 percent of educators drink heavily, and a similar proportion report regular drug use.
Lame.