Phoebe Kate

A number of years ago, I worked in NYC as an editorial assistant for a trade journal (which shall remain nameless to protect the guilty.)  My co-workers were three crusty old editors who were delusional — they thought they were living in a 1940s movie about tough-talking, hard-drinking newspaper reporters.

They envisioned themselves as Humphrey Bogart or Broderick Crawford.  They wore green eyeshades and chain-smoked unfiltered Camels.  If you deleted the expletives in their sentences, you’d have no words left.  They called me “baby” and “toots” and “kiddo.”  They summoned me by yelling at the top of their lungs, “Copy boy!”  (Which was totally unnecessary because the office space we inhabited was about the size of a walk-in closet.  They could have thought,  “Copy boy!” and I’d have heard them.)  

And they kept bottles of whiskey in their desks.  Which, I’m happy to report, they were generous in sharing with Toots, their “copy boy.”

“This is a rough business for a gal,” they’d tell me, shaking their heads as they poured us paper cups of Scotch at 10 AM and gazed at me skeptically.

Rough?  You gotta be kidding.  For four years, I got to pretend I was living in a 1940s movie as the spunky heroine (think: Katherine Hepburn, Carole Lombard, Bette Davis) plus have a couple of shots to start off the day — and finish the day, too, after we “put the paper to bed.”

Appropriately enogh, I recently ran across a tongue-in-cheek piece online, listing reasons why we should be allowed to drink at work:

1. It reduces stress.
2. It reduces complaints about low pay.
3. It cuts down on time off because you can work with a hangover.
4. It saves on heating costs in the winter.
5. It encourages carpooling.
6. It increases job satisfaction because if you have a bad job, you don’t care.
7. It reduces vacation time because people would rather come to work.
8. It makes fellow employees look better.
9. It makes cafeteria food (or takeout orders from the condemned-by-the-Board-of-Health deli across the street) taste better.
10. Bosses are more likely to be generous with raises after a couple of drinks.

Hmmm.  Can’t take exception to any of the above.

Two of the editors from that office of yore have gone on to the Great Press Room in the Sky.  I have no idea what’s happened to the third.  But to all three — and I know you’re drinking wherever you are — I raise my glass and say, “Here’s looking at ya, kid.”

~ phoebe kate