I worked at a call center. We had an hour for lunch. I had it timed down to a science. I could drive home, even in severe winter conditions, get up to my apartment, and queue up an episode of American Dad on Netflix. I had exactly the amount of run time of that episode at home for lunch, and I would smoke at least two bowls from my water pipe. If the morning had been especially hectic with angry customers, I'd hit it harder.
I'd walk back in to work with 10 minutes to spare. Sit down, catch up on emails I'd seen but ignored in the morning, and get situated back at my desk. Because it was a call center, and it was better to be 10 minutes early back from my lunch instead of 30 seconds late. I would then field my best calls of the day, and my metrics would prove this. I got the best response rates, the best feedbacks, and generally just felt the best about those calls. There was no anxiety, just two people on a phone call, and getting some tech support.
Was I driving while impaired on the way back to work? Yeah, and that shit is bad news, I'm not defending that. But given the stress and rigors of the call center, it's what I did to cope. This was before I took my mental illness seriously as an illness, and sought professional help with a doctor. Just me self medicating at home on my lunch break. But the raw data of my performance numbers don't lie, when I was blazed out of my fucking head, I was the best man or woman on the floor, period.
My manager loved me. But she didn't know every time we'd have our monthly face-to-face performance meetings, I was blazed out of my head then too. Why? She always booked them after my lunch break. My actual goal in those meetings was to see how much of her time I could waste, because they were only scheduled for a half an hour, and they want you on the phones producing all the rest of your metrics non-stop. But if I could get her talking and keep talking about work stuff, that meant more time I wasn't sitting under the barrel of the phones.
I don't know that I have a point to any of this. Just anecdotal evidence to throw on the pile from my own personal experience. But I only feel compelled to bring it up because that job was such a numbers and performance driven affair, and my data backs me up on this. I had actual proof in the numbers, beyond just the assumption that I was doing better because I felt better because I was high.