“Sliding Professional Scale” 😂 – AA Speaker – Jay S.

Jay S. takes the microphone with a story that’s simultaneously hilarious and deeply sad—the kind of dark comedy only someone who’s lived it can tell. He’s painting a picture of what his mornings looked like when he was still drinking, and what he describes isn’t just excess; it’s the machinery of addiction in full operation.

The routine was brutal. Jay S. would pop awake around four in the morning, his body jangled from the depressant effects of alcohol wearing off. And here’s where the sponsorship angle becomes crucial to the story—he had men in the program who cared about him, but the advice they gave him then wasn’t recovery guidance. It was pure alcoholic logic: keep a beer iced next to the bed so that when you wake up, you can drink it down and slip back into unconsciousness for a few more hours. He does this with a wry smile, acknowledging how “excellent” that advice was—which is to say, it was terrible.

By six in the morning, he’s up again, getting ready for work. But he can’t face the day sober, so he has a few beers before getting on the bus. He explains why he’s on the bus with the precision of someone who’s had to account for these decisions many times: no DUIs, no lawyer fees, no insurance nightmares. He’s lost enough already.

Then comes the punchline—and it’s a real moment from his life. Jay S. stood in front of a judge who looked at his blood alcohol level and said, “Mr. S., you blew a .28. Don’t you think that’s a little excessive?” And Jay S., with the confidence of a man whose mind is completely hijacked by the disease, looked the judge in the eye and said he was a bartender. Surely, he argued, there should be some kind of sliding professional scale. You can’t judge him by the same standards as other people. There was a professional category of drinker, and he occupied it.

The audience laughs—they get it. They’ve all done versions of this: the special pleading, the justifications, the architecture of denial. An AA speaker like Jay S. knows exactly how to hold up that mirror. The judge clearly did not find it funny. But the people in the room listening to this now do, because they recognize the voice of active alcoholism speaking—the part of the disease that convinced him that his bartending job made his .28 blood alcohol level reasonable.