my boss is annoyed that I stayed out late drinking during a three-day work event

This post was written by Alison Green and published on Ask a Manager .
I’m off today, so here’s an older post from the archives. This was originally published in 2018.
A reader writes:
I am a designer for an architectural firm and I was assigned to assist in a trade show, as our firm was one of the exhibitors. The show was held in my hometown so we needed to fly for the event.
The show proper is from 9 AM to 7 PM and fell on a weekend, starting on a Friday. As it was my hometown and my friends were living where the show was held, I decided to catch up with them for drinks after we ended the first day of the event. It was a way for me to de-stress as well. I went out at 10 PM, way after the first day ended, and ended up going back to our hotel at 5 the next morning, but I wasn’t drunk. Tipsy, yes. Blackout drunk, no. After that, I still managed to go to the show at exactly 9 AM. From 9 AM to 7 PM, I was fully-functional in manning our booth, fulfilling inquiries, and any other chores our boss needed me to do without a hitch. He even complimented my work for that day. We closed down our booth, and our boss and my coworkers went out to dinner.
During dinner, my boss asked me what time I got home, as I had asked permission from him if I could go out, which he allowed me to. I told him 5 AM and then he got mad. This is a non-verbatim flow of our conversation:
Boss: You shouldn’t have gone home at 5 AM because we are in the middle of a three-day event. If you didn’t go out, you could’ve done better today. You didn’t give out your full potential.
Me: Sir, I was at our booth at exactly 9 AM, answered inquiries diligently, fulfilled orders, and manned the booth with the way I do in the past shows.
Boss: You’re missing the point here. I’m not saying you didn’t do good today. If something happened to you in this city, which we are unfamiliar with, I am liable.
Me: Sir, this is my hometown. I know the city by heart.
Boss: Don’t argue with me. Going out for drinks even after work hours in a business trip is unprofessional.
His scolding continued and he was changing his points as I defended myself. I eventually shut up so that it wouldn’t escalate any further.
I was fully-functional and fulfilling work to be done on the day without any problems. My question is, was I really unprofessional for going out after work hours in this situation?
I wouldn’t say it was unprofessional exactly, but it didn’t show great judgment.
Going out after a work event is fine. But coming back to the hotel drunk at 5 a.m. when you need to staff an all-day event that starts four hours later isn’t the wisest thing to do.
Maybe you were 100% on your game and no one would have been able to tell that you were running on a few hours of drunken sleep. But for a lot of people, that would have affected their ability to be fully on for a full-day event, which tend to be pretty exhausting. It’s not surprising that your boss would want you to show up fully rested, or that he thought you were being cavalier about your work responsibilities. I’d agree with him there; it does sound you were being cavalier about them.
But your boss is also being weird in the way he’s explaining his objections — but probably more accurately, he’s just not explaining his objections well.
For the record, the thing about being liable for you in an unfamiliar city is weird. (And if you were a woman, it would sound grossly sexist and paternalistic, but I think from your email that you’re a man so we’ll stick to just weird and paternalistic.) And the idea that it’s always unprofessional to go out for drinks on a work trip is silly. People go out for drinks on work trips all the time, and it’s fine — as long as they’re reasonably well-rested and not hungover the next day.
But I suspect that he’s not articulating his concerns well and that they really just boil down to: “While you’re on a work trip, I expect work to be your first priority, which means that you should prioritize showing up well-rested and not hungover after going out drinking with friends. Even if you’re telling me you were fine the next day, there was enough of a risk that you wouldn’t be fine that this isn’t okay to do.”
And that’s absolutely reasonable, and it’s probably something he’s annoyed to have to tell you.
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