A Good Alcoholic

I found this question scribbled on top of some work notes I was reviewing from last year. Like most of my jotted down reminders that are over forty-five minutes old, it took me a good while to figure out what it actually meant. On a business trip, I had stopped after normal dinner hours at the Waffle House near my hotel (always near, always open, and I’m a waffle-man) to refuel and annotate some of the application notes I had made in the field.

Typical of the late night crowd there was a group of young men that were difficult to tune out, especially the giggly one that claimed he would “make a good alcoholic”. My first thought was that he should know better than to say such a thing, the second was that this young idiot was “me” in the 80′s, and finally will he or would I have stayed on that path if we truly knew what it entailed?

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The answer is probably yes in both cases but I still wonder what the answers would be if either of were interviewed for the position of the “good alcoholic”.

Is hygiene important to you?
Are you willing to quit anything and everything?
How do you feel about cheating, stealing, and lying?
Are you embarrassed easily?
Are you willing to forsake all others for the next drink?
Do you like drinking mouth wash?

You get my drift, the list is endless… and the answer is probably still a giggly yes from the both of us because no one ever believes they will get that bad. Unfortunately this is always an extremely easy position to fill; it’s the recovering alcoholic position that is always so hard to keep staffed.