Being dependably drunk at work seems a bit too far.
Call me old-fashioned…
So much from 40 years ago seemed like it happened on a different planet.
It’s like a scene from Mad Men or The Wolf of Wall Street.
The CBS office building was in Soho Square, just off Oxford Street. I took the tube to work every morning from Hampstead and got off at the Tottenham Court Road station. My office was on the sixth floor, and I strove, with utmost diligence and gut-churning dread, to stay away from The Third Floor, which housed A&R and promotion. No woman was safe there; the taunts and come-ons were urgent, and not friendly. The men in those two departments were notorious: loud, predatory, debauched, and dependably drunk by four in the afternoon. They started drinking, as well as ingesting other substances, early in the afternoon, and most of the women I knew in the company absolutely refused to go to the third floor anytime after lunch. In the mornings, when they were still hungover, it was relatively safe if you got in and out quickly; if it was essential to go there in the afternoon, you took a friend.
