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Comment by mmaunder | Hacker News Reader

My first thought is that you're opening yourself up to litigation. I drink wine and occasionally code with a glass of wine - the easy stuff, and I only commit the next morning. However, making strategic decisions, dealing with human issues and sending external communications is a bad idea.

Someone I'm close is a former CEO and majority shareholder of business that generated 8 figure yearly revenue. His advice to me was to "never hit the send button until the next morning". I'm inclined to give you the same advice.

Alcohol lowers your inhibitions and your sensitivity to the needs and feelings of others. It's a wonderful social lubricant but it also leaves you occasionally cringing the next morning as you remember what you said. Usually there's no record of it other than fading memory. Emails are on the record, so you may be cringing for a long time if you get it wrong and it could be expensive.

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I agree with what you say about the effects of alcohol. However, with small amounts, a glass of wine for example, the positive effect of getting things done is way bigger than the negatives for most people. Procrastinating and putting things off for weeks like the author is far worse than little bit of insensitivity in a mail.

Of course it's better if you don't need any toxics to live your life happily.

I wouldn't call a glass of wine a toxic.

You wouldn't sign an email with "Also, I'm drunk right now" but that's effectively what you've done here.

Kudos for honesty, but you've now put a time stamp that says, roughly, "I acknowledge being under the influence on Nov 27 2011, and further, this allowed me to behave differently than I normally would." Anyone you've interacted with today can go back to it. It's not just that you might be making bad decisions - you are publicly acknowledging that those decisions were made while drunk.

I think that the advice "Don't hit send until the next morning" is sound not only for post-booze emailing, but for anything done late in the day. Driving whilst overly tired (for example) is known to pose similar risks to driving under the influence of alcohol.

Although mmaunder has only mentioned holding off on emails due to drink, there are many other reasons why one might author an email one evening, but not send it in the morning (e.g. the need to check a fact with someone who has already gone to bed or is otherwise unavailable). That mmaunder was drunk is not an conclusion that can inevitably and reliably be drawn from such a timestamp.

Why is this significant? Alcohol can affect judgement, but so can fatigue, depression or lust. We're humans. Our brains are housed in our bodies and we have to make decisions under all kinds of physical influences all the time.

Barring being in a fanatical teetotaler culture, why does it matter that there's a record of him writing an email while moderately drunk? Business gets done in bars, lounges and karaoke places all over the world.

It's not like he made a spontaneous marriage proposal or signed up for the military. It was just a damned email, and a satisfactory one at that.

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