View from the North 40: Study reveals what's hiding behind those smiles

Scientific studies are great, but they often raise more questions than they answer, even if it’s just: “How much alcohol are we talkin’ here?”

ABC4 News station WZTV, reported in April that a study by Penn State and University of Buffalo researchers found that people in jobs that require them to exaggerate positive emotions, or suppress negative ones, drink more alcohol after work than people who aren’t expected to be nice to others.

The article gave food service workers, nurses and teachers as examples of the types of employees who are required to display extra enthusiasm at work or, y’know, pretend that you care beyond the level you naturally would.

At first I was feeling pretty self-righteous that I don’t drink after work, like I’m super human to be able to be able to fake this being nice stuff while remaining stone cold sober almost every day of the year. Sure there are plenty of days I dream about drinking lots of alcohol. Because life is cruel.

I’ve written about this before. I don’t drink much or often because it’s not much fun for me. I am defective. I get pretty much drunk off two drinks and then my body recognizes the third drink as an agent for alcohol poisoning — this, then, causes my stomach to self-pump to rid itself of the poison. I’m done after that.

To be honest, I had some dental work done this week and just getting my tooth numbed required 12 hours of sleep to recover.

A friend and I discussed the concept of drinking after work, and we figured that it’s just one form of self-medicating among a whole host of others — like watching too much television, or eating too much — that should be studied. I have a whole list of these behaviors that should be included in an expanded study. Not that I’m admitting any of them are a problem.

As our analysis of this topic was winding down, my friend casually says out of the blue, and this is pretty much the full quote: “Wait a minute, I’ve been to your office and talked to you on the phone while you’re there and you’re not overly positive with co-workers.”

And I was all, “What?! How is being blunt and sarcastic not considered putting out an effort to be overly positive?”

It’s a relative thing. The research said so. The article clearly says that suppressing negative emotions and actions is the same as being exaggeratedly nice. For some people, not sighing, eye-rolling or biting is the same as being nice.

It’s part of my charm.

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A co-worker, who shall remain nameless because she’s my boss, said the key to drinking is to start early in the day and just partake of a little bit all day, so if I actually start being nice while I’m at work, I think it would be fair to demand that I stop day drinking at http://www.facebook.com/viewfromthenorth40/.