Alex Hazlett
Nov 3 · 1 min read

Clearly I am not drinking in my Alohological weight class.

Sure, I CAN and sometimes DO drink more than I should, but I spent about 15 of my formative years in the military and as a defense contractor, neither of which support those behaviors noted above [well, the unofficial Marine Corps policy was ‘don’t appear drunk’] and they definitely punished or fired fools for acts like puking on your work or leaving obvious booze or booze detritus around work vehicles or spaces.

And when I was an intern, doing underwater arch in the Florida Keys, we didn’t drink while at sea (though we did muster at the bar at the end of the pier when we came in from offshore. And I’d have to say neither CRM company I’ve worked for has condoned being drunk on duty, as it were.

On the other hand, I do not do a lot of deployed fieldwork… its daytime (or rarely, nighttime) monitoring where I go home afterwards, or daytime survey (where I go home afterwards) or research, or working with (human) burial discoveries, or report writing and/or editing (where I go home afterwards). If I do go to another island to cover a project, I may drink in my off time, but I show up the next day sober to do the job.

While I support Archaeologists drinking whatever they think they can handle, if they are working, I hope they show up sober enough to do their part of the job.