When you’re starting out your career, there are too many pitfalls to count. Grabbing coffee for the higher-ups. Photocopying depositions. Cleaning windows with a silk rag and truffle oil. All normal parts of growing into a new job. But one thing you hear often is the necessity of paying your dews. At first, I wasn’t sure what this meant. For years, I thought it was “dues,” as if employment is akin to membership in a cult or fraternity without the inter-dimensional field trips. But working in advertising, there is very little that goes in unrelated to Yellow-5 and other artificial colors.
Going to business school isn’t important. Neither is sucking up to your superiors. But sucking down case after case of sugary soda shows everyone in the office that you have an affinity for both dye and carbonation. As long as you’re making a good impression, better wear a smock to skip any stains.
But Mountain Dew isn’t really a soda, is it? Long before a nation of teens stained their teeth the phosphorescent yellow of a tennis ball, the term held a different meaning. It meant moonshine. Bootleg whiskey to the patrons living in the mountains of West Virginia and Kentucky. It’s like calling your soda Coke despite its illicit connotations.
Drinking moonshine is important in an office, especially for underlings. It shows they are willing to break unjust laws for the good of the group. Fitting in isn’t easy, but it’s made far easier with the assistance 180 proof grain alcohol. It’s not a social lubricant, but a sort of blood oath between you and your bosses. Once you prove you’re willingness to drink a bottle of unlabeleld hooch, you won’t object to shredding a few documents – will you?
I didn’t think so.
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