Burning question about alcohol in the executive suites in days of yore

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Pellice

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OK, I admit it, I've been pacing through episodes of the old Dallas (never saw it the first time around). I've become fascinated by the amount of alcohol flowing in the top floors of Ewing Oil. Also saw same in Mad Men and other shows.

Having myself never operated at that level, and understanding that those days are long gone, and understanding also that TV exaggerates, here's my question: what were they drinking? I see these crystal containers (decanters?), none with identifying marks, but clearly the guys were not breaking open beers up there. Would they have whisky? vodka? Scotch? Would all three be on hand? What did comprise the liquor cabinet in the executive suite?
 
Pellice said:
OK, I admit it, I've been pacing through episodes of the old Dallas (never saw it the first time around). I've become fascinated by the amount of alcohol flowing in the top floors of Ewing Oil. Also saw same in Mad Men and other shows.

Having myself never operated at that level, and understanding that those days are long gone, and understanding also that TV exaggerates, here's my question: what were they drinking? I see these crystal containers (decanters?), none with identifying marks, but clearly the guys were not breaking open beers up there. Would they have whisky? vodka? Scotch? Would all three be on hand? What did comprise the liquor cabinet in the executive suite?
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I remember as a young newbie back in 1979 I visited our NY office. We were on a tour and got to visit the Board Of Directors Room. I recall a well stocked bar along one wall. (I wasn't offered a cocktail). :mad:
 
Scotch. At least thirty years aged.
 
Never saw alcohol in corporate offices. But this was in the south and Mid-Atlantic.

The Director of HR kept it in her drawer but I don't count that. ;)
 
Down this way, sour mash whiskey, Kentucky Bourbon, maybe some WIld Turkey.....drinks for real men. LOL:D

(especially if in the C suite of oil companies. Guns, too, in a free standing gun safe.)
 
I think it was much more common in the 70s when people would routinely drink at a business lunch for example. Maybe in some areas it continued in the 80s.

DWI enforcement got a lot tougher after that!
 
When I first got into engineering in the early 80's we'd have drinks at lunch most friday... sometimes just a beer, sometimes more...

Over time - it disappeared. By the mid 90's there was zero drinking at lunch. I remember laughing with a friend who had a complete jerk of a boss... She'd told her sister about it - (who worked for a Connecticut law maker). The sister advised her to break out the bottle from her desk drawer... and was shocked that wasn't a think in our workplace.

My husband worked for a two different architectural firms where the senior partners had bars in their offices... and couldn't be counted on around clients after lunch...
 
For some reason, I always thought the "celebration drink" they had on "Law and Order" was bourbon. I could be wrong, but I was somehow left with that impression.
 
Whatever that particular exec liked. The corporate airplanes are (not were) stocked with all of the favorites.
 
Our CEO loved to drink, scotch, sometimes to excess. I never witnessed it but there were many stories of him drinking and firing folks. I was warned to avoid him if he wanted to get a scotch.

I started there in the middle 80s and it was common to have a beer at lunch, sometimes more. Friday nights were fun. I recall being on-call with a totally nuts developer and were both intoxicated, very intoxicated. The first step of nightly, nobody understood it, blew up. We walked, stumbled arm in arm actually, into Megacorp drunk as skunks. There was a operator there who wanted to know who was going to fix the problem. We are! My drinking buddy had installed something that night and he commented out a line of code, reassembled a program into production and we went back drinking. He lived downtown and I crashed there.

Luckily that crap died out by the 90s.
 
I don’t drink myself, so I never had anything but Diet Coke in my office. When I was younger, our country manager went to drink at lunch every day, and then left the office around 5:30 to drink with friends. He would often come back to the office later in the evening, pretty hammered. (This was in Japan, btw). When I became country manager and later regional CEO for APAC, I flew to HQ in Europe about every six weeks. There was no liquor in the office there either, but the most of the global CEOs I worked for drank heavily every evening. We’d finish up meetings around 5:30 or 6, go back to the hotel to change to casual clothes, contact our teams in our regions as required, then meet again at around 8:30 for happy hour. Then dinner and more drinks. Then a club and more drinks, sometimes finishing at a cigar lounge at the hotel. It was usually a beer or wine to start, then more wine at dinner, then plenty of scotch, bourbon, or brandy, and not the cheap stuff either. BUT, nothing in the office. The office was for work. Restaurants and bars were for play.
 
rodi said:
When I first got into engineering in the early 80's we'd have drinks at lunch most friday... sometimes just a beer, sometimes more...

Over time - it disappeared. By the mid 90's there was zero drinking at lunch. I remember laughing with a friend who had a complete jerk of a boss... She'd told her sister about it - (who worked for a Connecticut law maker). The sister advised her to break out the bottle from her desk drawer... and was shocked that wasn't a think in our workplace.

My husband worked for a two different architectural firms where the senior partners had bars in their offices... and couldn't be counted on around clients after lunch...
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My dad stated the same thing about his boss. If you wanted a decision by him, you better get him before lunch. This was in the 60's.

We also used to have a beer at lunch on a Friday in the 80's. It stopped in the early 90's.
 
Whenever I would ask how people can function when they drink so much, I was always told, "Oh, you build up a tolerance."

Have never understood how people can stand the process of "building up a tolerance." Getting sick so you can tolerate something that is bad for you.

Same thing with cigarettes. Never made sense to me. "You build up a tolerance." "Gives you something to do with your hands" (which cracks me up - just what would you be doing with your hands, if you didn't hold a cigarette? Is it like when people give a dog something to carry in his mouth so he won't bite people?)
 
Being caught with any type of alcohol on Megacorp property was grounds for dismissal. There were several instances of executives "retiring" that were triggered by them being caught drinking (or drunk) at work.

A friend of mine one returned home one evening from the liquor store with beer in his car trunk. He got distracted and forgot about it. The next morning he was pulling into the parking lot and realized he still had a case of beer in his trunk. There was a shopping center about a mile away, he parked there and walked back to the building. He probably would have been fine - he told his manager who said don't worry about it - but he did not want to take any chances.

Off-sites events, were different. At one conference I was a speaker, a Megacorp executive invited all of the Megacorp speakers for a Happy Hour in a hotel conference room, where there was a variety of liquors. I saw a few folks bribe the servers into giving them bottles to take back to their hotel rooms.
 
We had a Chief Investment Officer who had a well known habit of over-imbibing at lunch. I recall a corporate strategy outing at a resort where we had all day session, a dinner break and then a couple hour session beginning about 8pm. He decided to dine in town rather than at the resort and returned from dinner totally drunk and chose to get into a nasty verbal argument with the third-party facilitator who we were paying to facilitate these strategy sessions.

I was very embarassed for the company and apologized to the third-party facilitator after the evening session and gave the executive's number-one, who was also in attendance, an earfull.

No drinking in the office for me or any of my colleagues. I worked for the CFO and frequently met with the COO, CEO, etc in their offices and I was never offered a drink other than coffee or water.
 
The three martini lunch was a viral meme back in the day. I remember going on a job interview in 1974 with a guy whose firm managed unemployment claims for client companies. He asked me if I was a drinker and my red flags went up. I gave some mealy mouthed answer implying that I drank a little but not much. As the interview went on I realized he was looking for a more affirmative answer because his people took clients out for those three martini lunches.
 
I guess you do build up a tolerance, otherwise nothing would have gotten done after 3 martinis!

But I'm still on the track of what was served in the executive suite. When Big Shot asks visiting Big Shot, "Can I pour you a drink"? what was the answer expected?
 
When I started in the brokerage (commodity trading) business in 1981 when the markets closed about noon local time the case of beer came out. It was just part of the biz. I know people that worked at higher-end firms that had very well stocked bars in the office.

The highest thing a client brought for me to celebrate in the office was a bottle of Glenlivit.We all had to celebrate a very favorable hog and pig report!

Yes my favorite funny movie is Trading Places with Dan Ackroyd and Eddie Murphy.

I also remember back in the early 1980's it was no big deal to go smoke a joint with the manager. Before I retired I was trying to explain this to young people in the investment business. I told them that the "drug test" had an entirely different meaning back then.
 
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In movies and TV, scotch and water or scotch on the rocks. Occasionally a choice, "bourbon or scotch?"
 
I'm pretty sure I blew a job interview by not taking a drink.

It was a USA based job. At lunch, a French gentleman took me to lunch as part of the interview. He ordered wine and wanted me to share. I had no intention of drinking during an interview! When I forcefully said no, I could see his demeanor change. I realized I just made a faux pas. Having the drink probably would have calmed down anyway.

I can see though, in their debrief meeting I was probably "not a fit with our culture."
 
When my friends were interviewing with potential employers back in 1980, many told stories of the execs, the HR person and the student going out for dinner and drinks to finish up the interview process. Seemed like a lot of fun to me, I couldn't wait to be "wined and dined". Upon my first interview in WV, I was so excited when they asked if I was up for lunch, they knew of a great little place. My big chance to be enticed by the VP, ass't VP, HR and myself! We drove to a small little diner in town and the strongest thing on the menu was unsweetened tea. They offered me a job with great $$, I accepted, and figured I could buy my own booze. I retired 35 years later, with a great nest egg, and made my own winery!
 
What a great Readers' Digest Condensed Version of a life story!

Booze is not allowed on Defense Department property without permission from, I think, the Secretary of Defense. During my tours at the Pentagon, up until 2001, such permission was granted at Christmas, when refreshment tables with punch bowls were moved into the corridors for all to sample. I don't know if that's still going on - nowadays, there's the fear of someone crashing their car and the employer getting sued.

Winemaker said:
When my friends were interviewing with potential employers back in 1980, many told stories of the execs, the HR person and the student going out for dinner and drinks to finish up the interview process. Seemed like a lot of fun to me, I couldn't wait to be "wined and dined". Upon my first interview in WV, I was so excited when they asked if I was up for lunch, they knew of a great little place. My big chance to be enticed by the VP, ass't VP, HR and myself! We drove to a small little diner in town and the strongest thing on the menu was unsweetened tea. They offered me a job with great $$, I accepted, and figured I could buy my own booze. I retired 35 years later, with a great nest egg, and made my own winery!
Click to expand...
 
I do recall a job interview about 1980 where we went out to lunch and both ordered a beer. The beer was served in a tall glass that was narrow at the bottom. In the course of our conversation I knocked over a half full glass of beer and the beer ended up in the interviwer's lap. How embarassing!

And no, I did not get an offer even after apologizing profusely.

56553443836161p
 
Winemaker said:
When my friends were interviewing with potential employers back in 1980, many told stories of the execs, the HR person and the student going out for dinner and drinks to finish up the interview process.
Click to expand...
Mid 80s: this happened to me at the old Digital Equipment Corp. We finished the interview at the local pub. Learning from my previous faux pas, I heartily partook. The manager basically said, "You got the job, let's celebrate!"

Nice. Got the offer but didn't accept the job simply because Boston was so expensive. In retrospect, it would have been a lot more fun than where I did end up working those early years, even though D.E.C. went down the drain.
 
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