The office Christmas party
It's my work Christmas thingy today.
There’s actually only one reason to go to the annual ‘Christmas Do’ and that’s if you’re not there, you’re the one that’s getting slagged off. Here’s my guide on why you shouldn’t go:
1. The only thing you have in common is that you work together. That’s it. You spend more time with these sorry bastards than with your friends and family and the only reason you are going out to eat a poorly-cooked, overpriced meal and get drunk with them is that you share the same dreary place of employment. Think of this as a foretaste of being put in an old people’s home, where you will be lumped in with a bunch of people that the only thing you have in common is age, decrepitude and hopelessness.
2. It’s the worst possible time of year to go for a drink anywhere because everyone else in the country has got the same idea. Pubs and bars are now full of amateur drinkers - like the evil thin-lipped woman from accounts who despite being only 34 but acting about 55, says she only normally drinks “One sweet sherry on New Year’s Eve” but then proceeds to get smashed on strange yellow, viscous drinks that look and smell either like sick or wee. Only she spends about half a f*cking hour at the bar deciding which brand of dusty, previously undisturbed bottled vileness she wants to drink and you to pay for (she also never gets a round in despite accepting drinks off everyone).
So you have to start early - good because you can get in somewhere, bad because it lengthens the drinking time available and increases the chance of everything going horribly wrong - like getting seriously hammered and ending up having a grudge f*ck with the evil thin-lipped woman from accounts (who probably lives in a house entirely decorated with pink furnishings).
Probably the best time to start is about 3.30pm - the crowds that came in at 11.30am for Christmas Lunch are slowly starting to stumble out, going on either to the next place or back to work to photocopy their genitals. To avoid getting too drunk too early you have to eat, which leads on to the next problem:
3. The food will be shit and the venue will be awful. You have to eat, it’s that or be utterly smashed by 5.30pm but it’s going to be rubbish and overpriced. Why will it be so bad?
a) You’re a captive market and you’re not coming back to this restaurant ever, ever, ever (especially after this meal) so they aren’t going to try and impress you. You’ve only come here because the place you went to last year was rubbish for all the same reasons as this one but you live on each year in eternal but vain hope of that one decent work meal.
b) Positioning at the table in the restaurant is key and you will screw this up because you foolishly stopped to get cash from an ATM (thus missing getting both a ‘good’ seat and the one free drink your boss bought everyone just before you got there). By the time you do get there, everyone is now sat down at that very long table covered in cheap ‘festive’ paper tablecloths, leaving only one space in the middle against the wall which would require you to have to clamber over and around people in order to sit down.
c) After clambering over and around people in order to sit down you find yourself sandwiched between two very fat people, who constantly talk across you. You are also sat opposite the boss. He or she will engage you throughout the meal in a very long and boring conversation about a subject you know nothing about - it’s entirely possible that this conversation will be work related and that this lack of knowledge on your part may have future implications for your career.
d) Everyone has forgotten what they ordered when they were asked to nominate about four weeks ago. The lowest paid person in the office (who bizarrely always gets landed with the thankless task of organising all this crap in the first place), hasn’t got here with the list yet. This is because immediately before you all left for the pub for a quick livener, the boss just gave her a last minute ‘quick task’ that will take about three or four hours. Several of the male members of your office when multi-beered will much later attempt to paw clumsily at her breasts or arse ‘jokingly’ hours after she eventually arrives (angry, tired and hungry) and they will fail to understand why she rebuffs them because they were “Just ‘having a bit of fun’ luv”.)
e) The restaurant owners have fitted in about 30% more people at your very long table than they usually do, so your left elbow will be in your fat neighbour’s gazpacho (it’s actually only tomato soup but it is at least cold) and your right elbow will be in the cranberry sauce that came with your other fat neighbour’s breaded melted cheese things (your starter either never arrives or has already been eaten one of your fat neighbours).
f) If you are a vegetarian, the vegetarian main meal option will either contain ham, salmon or both. In the unlikely event that the vegetarian option is any good and/or meat free, all of the available portions will get eaten by the non-vegetarians because it looked nicer than the other choices.
g) Service will be poor because half of your co-workers are bloody rude to the waiting staff and the waiters correctly suspect you probably aren’t going to tip well. If you do leave a reasonable tip, the waiters know that this will be absorbed by people like that git in the suede jacket from the office on the floor downstairs who will take £10 back from the kitty ‘in change’ because he “Didn’t have a pudding” and has conveniently forgotten drinking about two of the ten to twenty bottles of sour wine that you are now all arguing about paying for.
h) Because the restaurant owners know you aren’t coming back and aren’t going to tip, they aren’t wasting their decent chefs on you (if they have any, these are all at home on their day off). Your main meal has been at least partially prepared by the Kitchen Porter who hates all of you b*stards because none of the tips you don’t leave are making it back to him anyway. Don’t order anything with a creamy sauce.
4. The meal is done with, the arguments about the bill are over for now (although the simmering resentment over various petty details will continue well into the new year). You are now looking for the pub - a table has been reserved but you’re an hour late, the place is packed (and anyway it was a table for six and there are now twenty eight of you). All of the blokes that went straight to the pub instead of the meal because “Eating’s cheating!” are now utterly wrecked and saying “Wah-ha-ha-heyyy!!” a lot. It’s 6.30pm.
5. The rest of the evening is now the very delicate balancing act of working out your exit strategy - despite the fact that you hate everyone, you can’t leave while they are still slagging off the workmates who either didn’t come or left early (or they will start on about you the instant you leave, while you are just still in earshot). Neither can you stay too late as you risk getting very drunk and it all going horribly wrong.
It’s best to sidle off when everyone breaks up in to small groups, so that no-one notices you have gone (e.g. when all the fat blokes have started talking about football). Whatever you do, don’t misjudge your timing, get very drunk and end up having a grudge f*ck with the evil thin-lipped woman from accounts.
6. You misjudge your timing, get very drunk and ending up going home with and having a grudge f*ck with the evil thin-lipped woman from accounts. Everything in her house *is* pink.
7. You need to find a new job now or stay and feel honour bound to enter into a mutually unfulfilling and destructive relationship with the evil thin-lipped woman from accounts who is already subtly asking you if you want children.
Or is it just me?
There’s actually only one reason to go to the annual ‘Christmas Do’ and that’s if you’re not there, you’re the one that’s getting slagged off. Here’s my guide on why you shouldn’t go:
1. The only thing you have in common is that you work together. That’s it. You spend more time with these sorry bastards than with your friends and family and the only reason you are going out to eat a poorly-cooked, overpriced meal and get drunk with them is that you share the same dreary place of employment. Think of this as a foretaste of being put in an old people’s home, where you will be lumped in with a bunch of people that the only thing you have in common is age, decrepitude and hopelessness.
2. It’s the worst possible time of year to go for a drink anywhere because everyone else in the country has got the same idea. Pubs and bars are now full of amateur drinkers - like the evil thin-lipped woman from accounts who despite being only 34 but acting about 55, says she only normally drinks “One sweet sherry on New Year’s Eve” but then proceeds to get smashed on strange yellow, viscous drinks that look and smell either like sick or wee. Only she spends about half a f*cking hour at the bar deciding which brand of dusty, previously undisturbed bottled vileness she wants to drink and you to pay for (she also never gets a round in despite accepting drinks off everyone).
So you have to start early - good because you can get in somewhere, bad because it lengthens the drinking time available and increases the chance of everything going horribly wrong - like getting seriously hammered and ending up having a grudge f*ck with the evil thin-lipped woman from accounts (who probably lives in a house entirely decorated with pink furnishings).
Probably the best time to start is about 3.30pm - the crowds that came in at 11.30am for Christmas Lunch are slowly starting to stumble out, going on either to the next place or back to work to photocopy their genitals. To avoid getting too drunk too early you have to eat, which leads on to the next problem:
3. The food will be shit and the venue will be awful. You have to eat, it’s that or be utterly smashed by 5.30pm but it’s going to be rubbish and overpriced. Why will it be so bad?
a) You’re a captive market and you’re not coming back to this restaurant ever, ever, ever (especially after this meal) so they aren’t going to try and impress you. You’ve only come here because the place you went to last year was rubbish for all the same reasons as this one but you live on each year in eternal but vain hope of that one decent work meal.
b) Positioning at the table in the restaurant is key and you will screw this up because you foolishly stopped to get cash from an ATM (thus missing getting both a ‘good’ seat and the one free drink your boss bought everyone just before you got there). By the time you do get there, everyone is now sat down at that very long table covered in cheap ‘festive’ paper tablecloths, leaving only one space in the middle against the wall which would require you to have to clamber over and around people in order to sit down.
c) After clambering over and around people in order to sit down you find yourself sandwiched between two very fat people, who constantly talk across you. You are also sat opposite the boss. He or she will engage you throughout the meal in a very long and boring conversation about a subject you know nothing about - it’s entirely possible that this conversation will be work related and that this lack of knowledge on your part may have future implications for your career.
d) Everyone has forgotten what they ordered when they were asked to nominate about four weeks ago. The lowest paid person in the office (who bizarrely always gets landed with the thankless task of organising all this crap in the first place), hasn’t got here with the list yet. This is because immediately before you all left for the pub for a quick livener, the boss just gave her a last minute ‘quick task’ that will take about three or four hours. Several of the male members of your office when multi-beered will much later attempt to paw clumsily at her breasts or arse ‘jokingly’ hours after she eventually arrives (angry, tired and hungry) and they will fail to understand why she rebuffs them because they were “Just ‘having a bit of fun’ luv”.)
e) The restaurant owners have fitted in about 30% more people at your very long table than they usually do, so your left elbow will be in your fat neighbour’s gazpacho (it’s actually only tomato soup but it is at least cold) and your right elbow will be in the cranberry sauce that came with your other fat neighbour’s breaded melted cheese things (your starter either never arrives or has already been eaten one of your fat neighbours).
f) If you are a vegetarian, the vegetarian main meal option will either contain ham, salmon or both. In the unlikely event that the vegetarian option is any good and/or meat free, all of the available portions will get eaten by the non-vegetarians because it looked nicer than the other choices.
g) Service will be poor because half of your co-workers are bloody rude to the waiting staff and the waiters correctly suspect you probably aren’t going to tip well. If you do leave a reasonable tip, the waiters know that this will be absorbed by people like that git in the suede jacket from the office on the floor downstairs who will take £10 back from the kitty ‘in change’ because he “Didn’t have a pudding” and has conveniently forgotten drinking about two of the ten to twenty bottles of sour wine that you are now all arguing about paying for.
h) Because the restaurant owners know you aren’t coming back and aren’t going to tip, they aren’t wasting their decent chefs on you (if they have any, these are all at home on their day off). Your main meal has been at least partially prepared by the Kitchen Porter who hates all of you b*stards because none of the tips you don’t leave are making it back to him anyway. Don’t order anything with a creamy sauce.
4. The meal is done with, the arguments about the bill are over for now (although the simmering resentment over various petty details will continue well into the new year). You are now looking for the pub - a table has been reserved but you’re an hour late, the place is packed (and anyway it was a table for six and there are now twenty eight of you). All of the blokes that went straight to the pub instead of the meal because “Eating’s cheating!” are now utterly wrecked and saying “Wah-ha-ha-heyyy!!” a lot. It’s 6.30pm.
5. The rest of the evening is now the very delicate balancing act of working out your exit strategy - despite the fact that you hate everyone, you can’t leave while they are still slagging off the workmates who either didn’t come or left early (or they will start on about you the instant you leave, while you are just still in earshot). Neither can you stay too late as you risk getting very drunk and it all going horribly wrong.
It’s best to sidle off when everyone breaks up in to small groups, so that no-one notices you have gone (e.g. when all the fat blokes have started talking about football). Whatever you do, don’t misjudge your timing, get very drunk and end up having a grudge f*ck with the evil thin-lipped woman from accounts.
6. You misjudge your timing, get very drunk and ending up going home with and having a grudge f*ck with the evil thin-lipped woman from accounts. Everything in her house *is* pink.
7. You need to find a new job now or stay and feel honour bound to enter into a mutually unfulfilling and destructive relationship with the evil thin-lipped woman from accounts who is already subtly asking you if you want children.
Or is it just me?