A Broad in America

A weakness for wine: is it okay to drink at lunch?

The August issue of Marie Claire magazine (U.S. edition) features the following career advice:

Q: Colleagues order wine at a business lunch. Should you?

A: Absolutely not. You're putting yourself in a weak position if you drink at any work function. -Linda Bell Blue, executive producer Entertainment Tonight and The Insider

Obviously, Linda Bell Blue has never enjoyed a Friday pub lunch or been to an office Christmas party in London. That aside, her advice reflects a cultural difference between the UK and the U.S. In the UK, people assume that you can decide for yourself whether or not you can handle a drink at lunch time without "putting yourself in a weak position". You're allowed to take responsibility for yourself without the company fearing that you'll drive home drunk and sue them. You don't need an encyclopedic HR manual to figure out what's okay and what's not okay.

I'm not saying that one should drink every day at lunch. I'm not saying that one should drink at all at lunch. I'm just saying that a small glass of Shiraz goes well with a steak sandwich.

Repatriation and the element of otherness

I came across an article which states that expats assimilate too much after around five to seven years abroad, making repatriation difficult; for this reason companies are encouraged to keep expat postings to between two to four years.

I've been reading a lot about how being an expat becomes a major part of one's identity.

Our friends back 'home' think of us as "Mary in Japan" or "Susan in Dubai." In our host countries, we are always the foreigner – the one who is different. Even the very way we introduce ourselves and think of ourselves tends to be connected with this element of 'otherness'.

I guess I had not really realized it since technically I've been an expat most of my life. My family moved to the U.S. from Canada when I was eight years old and I enjoyed having a background which was just a little bit different than my peers. In the grand scheme of things, Canada and the Midwest U.S. are not that different culturally, but it did seem exotic to the other kids at school that we had a dog who "spoke" French.

I always identified with being Canadian, though having left at such a young age, it took an effort to maintain a connection with my country of birth. Besides trips to visit family members, I studied Canadian politics at university and spent a summer in a French immersion program in Québec city. Ironically, the thing that made me feel the most American was when I started my job in the UK and was subjected to constant disparaging remarks about Americans from my Australian boss. By then I was a dual citizen, but my boss excused his comments saying "Oh, it doesn't apply to you, you're Canadian."

Now I'm back in the U.S. and I don't want to be one of those people who keeps banging on about the living overseas (ummm, except maybe in this blog), so in many cases, it's part of my secret identity. I guess if I want to maintain my "element of otherness", I could always get another French-speaking dog.