You all make some excellent points. I work in an occupation where the entry level and second level employees get regular alcohol and drug tests--they must stay clean and sober. So there's no advantage to drinking and indeed a huge disadvantage to testing positive--they're fired.

However, my daughter works in a consulting company where she and other managers regularly take clients out to lunch, get together at cocktail parties and attend other functions where it is required to drink. That is what you do at parties, drink and flirt. She has to walk that fine line between impressing the brass with her brains and with her ass at the same time.

She also has another advantage; she smokes. You have no idea how many contacts, networking, she has made while outside in the smokers' area at work, with other bigshots who also smoke. It's as though they have their own secret society, bonding together against us nonsmokers and branding us clean and sober types as puritannical.

Indeed, she and I have had many words on the subject, when she will call me Ms. Goody Two-Shoes because I drink only occasionally and don't smoke. As if I were making some kind of moral statement by my life style. Personally, I think she's making more of a comment on her own by her actions.