It's the thing I miss most about working in the office. We would take an extra long lunch almost every Friday at a local bar down the street, then come back to the office and mostly work on skunkworks projects. Some of our most creative stuff came from those Fridays.

Now my Fridays are filled with the same monotony as the rest of the work week.

People don't know how to work remotely. It's still kind of a new concept in the mainstream after all.

You need to make social engagements during the day with friends. Otherwise it's lonely and isolating. as a nice plus, seeing your actual friends is much nicer than seeing your workplace "friends" who'd likely sell you out for half a dollar.

Go grab lunch at a pub, coffee, do some exercise or whatever.

Between my wife and children and neighbors and friends, I am the opposite of lonely and isolated. Not every remote worker is a hermit.

My company just gives us Friday afternoons off.

As a younger engineer, I had very good times working in Central London and getting hammered with colleagues two nights a week on the regular. With tons of people from other companies at the pub too. I'm all in with remote work but that was pretty nice.

When I started working in the 90s, pub lunch was still everyday, when I started doing consultancy, my mentor loved to take out customers for lunch on expenses. He knew which pub in every town had a lock in as well so it meant late nights too.

I soon stopped drinking at lunch though, never do it anymore, never got much work done in the afternoon and made me a bit too aggressive..

Not really. Being the only woman around a bunch of drunk frat-like guys is not fun.

Should be taken as a sign that it's not a woman's business to be there.

That's what you took away from this?

If I don't feel comfortable somewhere I leave. I don't try to ruin it for everybody else. Women like doing that.

?

Hen parties can get pretty obnoxious too.

Ooh, it's all got a bit ill-humoured in this thread; perhaps I should expand. Hen parties (batchelorette parties for left-ponders) can and do get obnoxious, no-one that's been to a pub in the UK could deny that: screaming, splashing Prosecco around, hooting with laughter at giant inflatable penises, I'll discreetly move to a different part of the pub. Do I think them morally reprehensible? Absolutely not, any group of young people drinking will include some who don't drink very often, so don't know their limits. Everyone is obnoxious when they start drinking, but they have to learn somehow (or become teetotal). So while I dislike hen parties, I defend them, you go girl(s). If you feel that way (I think many do), then you really have to afford the same tolerance to groups of young men. That was my point.

Your comment doesn’t seem to come from a bad place but is a bit out of touch in my opinion.

I’m generalising but can imagine that, for a woman, dealing with a group of pissed city boys feels much more uncomfortable than your brush ins with hen do’s.

This is all ignoring the fact that this thread is around drinking during work hours. So I don’t think the comparison to hen do’s is fair in the first place.

This "Sir Galahad" approach of excusing the drunken ladies their misdeeds strikes me as rather like mansplaining, "manexcusing" if you will. Women don't need their bad behaviour explained and excused by men, they are quite capable of suffering the vomiting and hangovers (and learning from them) themselves.

You're comparing apples to oranges. Personal, individual annoyance from a group of women being rowdy vs. the physical aggression, and undertones of violence that are associated with it, that comes from a group of drunk young guys.

There is a lot of low quality comments on this, I feel sorry for that.

What everybody who does not feel well under these conditions should never the less consider is: Connections are formed during these events and collective rule breaking is an effective bonding mechanism. Further more, getting intoxicated together is a convenient way to make statements and have a degree of deniability afterwards.