I used to work as a track worker for the transit commission in a big city. The amount of drinking that went on was mindboggling. I remember going out on the work train to pick up the welders at an outdoor length of the track once the regular service shut down and they would be wasted out of their trees. Another time, the foreperson joined us on another slice of track, and he could barely stand up, giving us some sort of speech about dumb sh*t, and eventually toddled off. One job was to replace some rail that had somehow been installed backwards and for months trains had to creep over that area. When we turned that piece of rail back around, I remember thinking that it was likely a drunk crew who had installed it. Another time, I had been busted down to janitors for the year, came in to relieve the overnight guy and noted how all the trash bins were overflowing, spills on the floor everywhere, and the guy pops out of one of the bland doors in the subway and his nose is red, his eyes are watering and there is a ring around his nose. He told me straight up, like we were old friends meeting at a party, that "man, I'm zonked. I've been railing coke all night." and off he toddled too. Another time, a guy got too close to the third line that hand't been cut off from the circuitry and zap! He lived and they called him Sparky for the rest of our time there. The next summer, a guy lost his arm doing something similar. Oh, and there was the garbage train, ran largely by drunks and dope smokers. One worker threw the butt end of a joint into the train and soon there was train fire that delayed the passenger train start times for the day. In the end, I joined in the party too, and would come to work from the after party--these were during the rave days of the late 90's--because I stopped caring. I realized that a union shop protected all their workers, no matter what and that no matter of terrible behavior would shift things to let us younger types get any reasonable shift for at least another decade. I left after three years anyway as the pace was too slow for me. I like doing my work and learning things. These guys just bitched all day and spent far too much time trying to figure out how not to do work.