This will be a little crude and all that, but it does reflect a different time, so here goes:
My first duty station in England was RAF Upper Heyford (since closed) in Oxfordshire. I was in IT, system admin, supporting the Personnel function, so my office was in Personnel. It was a single “pit,” with five of us in one large room.
Because we routinely handled classified information, our office had a cipher lock on it, and only a few people besides ourselves had the combination, which meant we didn’t have the normal foot traffic a lot of offices did.
A couple of us (me included) brewed beer at home, so after clearing it with the Personnel chief, we took to having a little Friday happy hour in our office, we’d bring in beer from home, or a bottle of something else we liked, and we’d have a couple of drinks in the afternoon.
The chief was a very quiet, kind of nerdy guy, so we were surprised when he not only said it was ok that we did that, but joined us most Fridays.
On one occasion, we were sitting there, finishing the day’s work, having our little happy hour, and out of nowhere, he observed, “You know why you guys are my favorites? Because this is the only place in the building where I can drink a beer and talk about
!”
