Dear Businesslady,

I work in a small office (like we-don’t-have-any-HR-department small). My co-worker, who is my age (30), is an alcoholic. He used to be a really intense one — like fucking-up-all-the-time, mystery-sick-days, smelling-like-a-distillery, positively-purple-and-about-to-pass-out-in-meetings kind of intense. Then he was sent on a mandatory leave of absence by the management, for detox. He came back sober, but flash forward a year and he’s back to drinking at work on the regular. He’s not as extreme as he was, but his breath smells like alcohol most days, and sometimes he has hand tremors. The other day I secretly smelled the bottle of juice on his desk — it was mostly vodka.

The other day I spoke to him privately about his continued drinking at work. He seemed to be concerned only by the possibility of being fired. He told me he never sought the recommended post-detox treatment (therapy, AA, anything). I tried to be compassionate while mainly sticking to facts (because that’s what the websites about confronting your alcoholic co-worker all said to do), and encouraged him to seek treatment. 

He’s tough to work with in general, due to traits that I suspect are linked to his addiction (sullen, silent, uncooperative, undependable, with a ‘victim’ mentality). I’m also worried he won’t be on the ball for some upcoming work responsibilities (we will shortly have many new people to train, and he’s one of the employees being tasked with training). WTF do I do, Businesslady? Am I enabling his addiction if I don’t say something to management? And what are some other important things for people to know about booze and the workplace?

Dear Worried,

This is obviously a problem on a different order of magnitude than “my coworker is being kind of a pain,” and I don’t blame you at all for being concerned.

I’m sitting alone in Girvan, Scotland, on one of the longest days of the year, looking at the late sun and thinking about the women who all of a sudden caught fire.

There were a good number of them. Enough, in the 1700s, to constitute a chapter in the medical literature. The most-quoted British case is Grace Pitt, a 60ish female whose charred corpse was discovered one morning in 1744—like “a log of wood, consumed by a fire.” But there was no fire in the grate. And nothing else in the room had been singed. Pitt was caught, it seemed, in a strange flame that came from within.

Until recently, I knew of spontaneous combustion only from Krook in Bleak House, whose demise seemed ridiculous to me before I picked up the novel and unblinkingly terrifying when I got to the passage in question. But the eerie little tradition that Dickens extends makes a man like Krook exceptional as well as late. (Bleak House began publication in 1852.) In the eighteenth century, those who burn are often as mysterious as Krook; many are poor; many are single or widowed; almost all are old. As Dickens himself wrote in a letter, however, the real-life cases were “all of women.”

How did combustion happen? Of course it didn’t. But one cause was reasonable enough: gin. A dissembling liquid— sometimes clear as water, sometimes cloudy with dubious flavors. The newest, most dangerous of the hard liquors. Those who drank too much soaked their very flesh and blood in its treachery. Fire was the just consequence.

To be a woman who dares overstep her place in the physical or the digital worlds is to be branded a target by men, men who wish to return to halcyon days: of women only seen (except when they shouldn’t be) but not heard, of apron-donning, of apple-cheeked ma’ams bowing to their every whim. For these men, food — or rather, feeding — is the second most important women’s work (with the first being to create/carry/raise the man’s children), and the domestic kitchen is the only place a woman should be when she isn’t tidying up the homestead or on her knees.

Note “domestic,” since every woman-in-the-kitchen joke should include an asterisk that of course, you wouldn’t mean the professional kitchen, as those are still dominated by men. A 2014 study found that 95% of executive chefs (those running the kitchen) are men, while a 2005 study cited in Deborah A. Harris and Patti Giuffre’s book Taking the Heat: Women Chefs and Gender Inequality in the Professional Kitchen puts the percentage of men working as sous chefs (second-in-commands in the kitchen) at 82% and as line cooks (the ones you see sweating and running behind burners) at 66%.

Where do women dominate? Of course, at pastries: Flowery, delicate, intricate pastries that would collapse under strong, calloused man hands. But dessert is only the powdered cherry on top of beautiful man food (aka the stuff you pay for) rather than home food (aka the stuff your mom makes you because she has to — because she’s a woman, because she belongs in the kitchen, etc. etc. etc.)