You can be paid to drink booze

Birthday party in the office
Birthday party in the office



Does your employer allow drinking at work? The chances are that it's an absolute no-no, and the kind of thing that's likely to get you fired on the spot. The idea of someone showing up with booze in their bloodstream is a health and safety nightmare in action. Even if they somehow avoid causing serious injury to themselves or someone else - they are unlikely to be putting in their finest day's work.

However, there are bosses who feel differently about booze, and some jobs where drinking on the job is all in a day's work.

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1. Shitfaced Shakespeare
This bizarre production has arrived in London. The idea is that serious actors perform a serious production of A Midsummer Night's Dream. The bizarre twist is that before the performance each night one member of the cast gets completely smashed. They bumble their way through the play - while the rest of the cast are required to improvise around them in an effort to deliver a passable version of the play.

2. Beer salespeople
There's a lot more to the job than drinking, but it is part of the job. You're required to call in on regular customers and persuade them to place large orders. Part of this process means opening a few samples and enjoying them with your client. It's a hardship, but someone has to do it.

3. Food and drink critic
You wouldn't be doing your job properly if you neglected the wine list when you sampled everything on offer at a restaurant. It means all that delicious food will need to be washed down with a drop or two of fine wine while you think up pithy ways to criticise the restaurant's choice of curtains or the chef's choice of garnish.

4. Distiller
Part of the scientific and exact process of distilling a good spirit is tasting as you go along. Don't think you'll be knocking back pints of the stuff, but there will be the odd sip here and there on offer.

5. Tech geek
It may not be the first drinking role that springs to mind, but tech companies are known for offering unusual employee benefits to their young employees. As a result, a number will offer 'free beer Friday' or 'Beer O'Clock', so that for at least an hour every Friday, drinking at work is considered perfectly normal.

6. Vicar
Once the wine is blessed in church ready for communion, it needs to be consumed. Fortunately over time, estimates will get fairly accurate, but in the early years any trainee priest will get through an awful lot of over-blessed communion wine.

7. Advertising
It's not quite the world of Mad Men, but some advertising agencies still have a culture of drinking and socialising. Nowadays, it is usually reserved for after-hours, but some agencies still encourage it. One advertising agency, the Arnold Worldwide Ad agency in Boston, even has a beer vending machine, and employees are given a number of credits to use each month - usually after hours.

Of course, regardless of whether it's part of the job or not, the key is always moderation. If you step over the line between socialising with colleagues, and getting embarrassingly smashed, it's going to be very hard to go back.



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