Is it too early to start missing the good old days at work? How about the good old hours?
It used to be that your employer provided this thing called a “desk” and you came into this place called an “office,” where you stayed, working hard or, at least, looking like you were working hard, for eight hours.
And then — drumroll, please — came Happy Hour. This was the hour when you and your co-workers left your desks to meet at a bar, where you would discuss the horrors and the triumphs of the eight hours you had just spent at work.
It was mostly bad news and usually depressing, and yet it was always the best 'hour of the day.
That was then. This, in case you haven’t noticed, is now.
And in the now, Happy Hour is an endangered species, or so I learned by reading “Unhappy Hour,” a recent article by Luke Winkie on slate.com.
“There was a time,” Winkie reminds us, “when an after-work happy hour — loosely organized among a gaggle of officemates, all searching for a hit of debauchery to turn off the resentments of an annoying shift — was one of the sacred rites of employment.”
The reason behind the demise of the Happy Hour is not difficult to suss out. It was COVID-19 that killed the Happy Hour.
“Marshaling a troop of drinkers to a bar isn’t easy when your office floor is empty,” Winkie writes, “and that hindrance would persist deep into our age of institutionalized remote work — in which face-to-face intraoffice interactions are filtered exclusively through the cloudy lenses of MacBook cameras.”
But it’s not just the remote workers who are to blame. As we return to the office, either by choice or motivated by the whips of our executive overseers, it is obvious that spending 60 minutes sharing tipsy tales with co-workers is an existential threat to continued employment.
In the age of AI, whatever you do or don’t do on your job, you definitely don’t want to spread it around. Once ChatGPT or Gemini or Claude or Grok learns all your secrets, the need for a human being to do your job vanishes, taking your paycheck with it.
The following three workplace sociability hacks won’t replace the Happy Hour, but they could result in a mildly cheerful 15 minutes and save your job in the process. (No need to thank me, but you could buy the next round of drinks.)
No. 1: Have Happy Hour at Your Place.
Just because you work remotely doesn’t mean you can’t have Happy Hours.
Instead of sending an invite to a Zoom meeting, invite the gang to gather in person at your house after work. You’ll have to provide cocktails and snacks (I recommend pigs in a blanket and ants on a log.) Your co-workers will love you for providing a venue where they can open their hearts and speak freely. And once Happy Hour is over, you can report everything they said to management.
No. 2: Order up a Happy Hour.
Can’t entice enough co-workers to have a successful Happy Hour? Pack the house by ordering those irresistible pig and ant snacks from DoorDash or Uber. Once the delivery people arrive, pay for an extra hour of their time and pay for their drinks, too. It will be pricey, but well worth it, since the hourly workers will have the same complaints as your exalted, full-time co-workers now have. Or will have, once they are replaced by AI and become gig workers themselves. (Don’t bother to hire clowns. You’ve got enough of them at work.)
No. 3: Switch It Around.
Since AI will inevitably take over your job, now’s the time to figure out what you are going to do for the eight hours a day when you used to work. I recommend stretching the Happy Hour from one hour a day to seven. That leaves one hour a day for work.
One hour should be enough time to check the work your AI system has done — assuming your company has not hired a second AI system to check the output of the first AI system — and still have a few minutes left over to focus on Job No. 1: polishing your resume.
Sound good? As Luke Winkie asks, “Shouldn’t there be at least one component of our professional routine that doesn’t kill our soul?”
You can ask your manager, but I can give you their answer right now.
“Nope!”
Bob Goldman was an advertising executive at a Fortune 500 company. He offers a virtual shoulder to cry on at bob@bgplanning.com.
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