Time is often the enemy when spent in a bar

The Editor's Vineyard

We've pointed out before how time seems to enter a different dimension in a bar. One of our favorite examples of this occurred during those heady days working as a newsman in San Francisco.

The business publication I worked for had just a few employes and we all got to know each other very well. A good deal of drinking went on, much of it at infamous lunchs at some bar that lasted all afternoon and often into the evening.

If nothing else the staff could certainly hold the hard stuff, with one exception, and that was our office manager. He had a very low tolerance to alcohol and this created some interesting situations for him to say the least.

His big problem was to forget to call home if it turned out one of those long lunches continued on into the evening as they sometimes did. His wife was the nervous type and she always had visions of her husband getting hit by a Muni bus or something when he was actually still at a bar with his shiftless associates. And of course having dinner on the table for several hours never is popular with the Spouse.

After one of these sessions he was really in trouble at home, lets just say that it was real quiet at the family residence. Our advertising manager stepped into the situation by giving him a lecture on the advantages of calling home and explaining he had to work late on some special financial statement or some such. And our office manager took the advice to heart and pledged to do exactly that the next time.

There was of course no mention of there not being a next time. We all knew better than that. And his wife probably did too.

It wasn't much later that the Staff again had one of those lunches that looked like it was going to go on to dinner time and beyond. And on this occasion our office manager was with us. There was the usual dice shaking and drinks and he was soon rather the worse for wear.

He disappeared for a time and upon his return proudly told one and all that he had called his wife and told her that everyone else had gone home, he was alone in the office, and had skipped dinner to work on a special report that the boss wanted on his desk the next morning

There was only one fault with this scenario. It was only 3:15 in the afternoon.

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Last Update:5/15/97

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