The Grand Tradition Of “F*** It Friday” Begins

Roughly two years before the health crisis, I worked for a company with a fairly lenient alcohol policy; in fact, at some company events, even on company property, they served alcohol. It was not uncommon for executives and managers to have a drink at lunch on a Friday and finish out the day.

One day, one of my employees went to lunch on his twenty-first birthday and had a couple of beers, and I drove him back to work to finish out his shift. He does basic computer input, and he has no contact with customers or operating machinery or anything dangerous.

I got a note from Human Resources saying that I needed to give the employee a formal warning for what he did when they heard about it. I pointed out that there wasn’t a policy to enforce, and they decided to create a zero-tolerance alcohol policy based on this event. What they didn’t understand was that they had two other policies in effect that we exploited.

In order to make sure that people didn’t infect the workforce, there was an “infection reduction policy” that allowed for people who called in sick after working part of the day to go home and get paid for the whole day. We could use this once per paycheck, every two weeks. There was another Work From Home policy that allowed for employees to work from home for half a day without needing a reason. We could also use this once per paycheck, every two weeks.

After hearing about this zero-tolerance alcohol policy, I instructed all of my employees that if they were going to have a drink at lunch that they should either call in sick for the rest of the day or work from home for the rest of the day. Eventually, it got to the point where we would have a drink at lunch every Friday and alternate working from home or calling in sick. Drunkenness, after all, counted as a sickness to the letter of the policy.

We called it “F*** It Friday.”