All source material comes from the Facebook page Weber State Confessions

Confession: I just got employee of the year at my job but in reality I spend 8 hours trying to get away with doing nothing and drinking on the job. I’m a horrible employee.

Have you ever eaten one of the blueberry scones from Starbucks? They’re delicious, aren’t they? Well, what you’re tasting whenever you bite into one of those sumptuous pastry treats are tears. My tears.

See, in my early 20s, I worked as a temp at the industrial bakery that mass manufactures those scones. It was a Fordian hellhole—imagine if the chocolate factory episode of “I Love Lucy” had been written by Upton Sinclair.

For 12 hours a day, I stood beside a conveyor belt as coworkers—mostly ex-cons with neck tattoos—buried me in a nest of baked goods. I feverishly arranged them onto trays and sent them back along the conveyor belt. When I closed my eyes at night, I saw the scones.

To this day, the scent of blueberries elicits a feeling of hopelessness in me I imagine only a child abandoned at a bus station knows.

There wasn’t a day that went by that I didn’t think, “A fifth of Wild Turkey would really take the edge off right about now”—in fact, most of the time, I wished I’d dropped acid before my shift because surely whatever LSD-induced nightmare I’d have experienced would have been less psychologically injurious than the profound tedium that was my job.

It was because I knew I was capable of something so much better, something so much more meaningful. That feeling of suffocation brought about a powerful impulse to deaden my faculties with something alcoholic, hallucinogenic or even faintly poisonous.

My point is, if you find your work to be meaningful and stimulating—the kind of work, fortunately, I was finally able to find—that impulse to drown those negative feelings doesn’t haunt you anymore.

The problem isn’t that you’re a “bad employee.” You’re feeling stagnant, trapped—like your ambition is being slowly extinguished—and a stiff drink is how you medicate that. Find something meaningful, work that challenges you. You owe it to yourself.

Of course, there’s always the distinct possibility that you’re just a hopeless case doomed to a life of alcoholism. In which case, spring for a nice flask and stick to the clear stuff.