Christmas party

We had our work Christmas party last Friday. Was a whole lot better then last years...

Link to last year’s party

This year we were in a club, looking out over the beach. Good food, free bar.
Thought I’d leave off posting an entry until I see what sort of fallout resulted.
Not a lot it turns out. Looks like all the wayward kids decided to ‘get a bit’ of discretion.

The thing I’ve noticed about a lot of Christmas parties is a desperate rush by a load of people to ‘get with’ someone from work. As though the rules are changed for one night.
Ordinarily it takes a couple of days for someone to end up with a 'post party rep' but a new record has been set by one girl who had started as a receptionist just a week earlier. The party started at one in the afternoon and she had a reputation by eight o’clock that night.
I think history is caught in a feedback loop that’s slowly tightening.

There was a fancy dress theme.
Some of the boys did it, as did quite a few of the girls, and everyone else dressed nice.
As usual, there was a guy who dressed up like a woman, and he won a prize for best costume.
Why is it almost always the guy that dresses up like a woman that scores the prize for best effort? The decision was made by a group of girls. Are women not bored of seeing men dressed up as parodies of women?

There were mechanical surfboards pitching young guns off into the scenery, video games, and a fortune teller booth. I lined up a fellow sceptic to accompany me into 'flaky land.'
Fortune teller reckons I’m going to have a close relationship with in six months. I pressed him for more details and it will be a proper relationship, not just copping off in an ally behind the pub. I said that if I found true love within the next six months, I'd track him down and write him a cheque for a thousand dollars.
Let’s call the end of June the cut off.

So how was your Christmas party?

Another break from the Spanish dolphins.

I’m starting to view these as ad breaks :-)

We had the work Christmas party on Friday.
Some genius decided that it would be a good idea to have people stand in a field next to a theme park (packed with children on holidays) for three hours, with the only cover being a tree up one end of the paddock.
A large group of us clustered around in the meagre shade, and we were accurately compared to a herd of cows looking for shelter.

Its winter everywhere else it would seem, so I need to set the scene.
Imagine somewhere really hot (Americans can think of Death Valley, Brits will remember Spain in the summer, and Eastern Europeans can use Chernobyl as a benchmark)
Now set a couple of tables out, and across the glaring white tablecloth, marshal regiments made up of bottles of beer, and plastic cups of cheap white wine.
Next door, line up a crew of minimum wage unfortunates (this is minimum wage in Oz so it’s not quite as bad as minimum wage in the U.S.) to stand in the sun dressed up like penguins, to man the row of bain-maries filled with sausages, and sweaty chicken drumsticks.

The whole affair was pretty badly organised. It took me more then two hours to discover that there were bottles of champagne and red wine available behind the bar (at least red wine is tolerable when it is lukewarm.)

After three hours roasting in the sun (I have a touch of red today,) a group of us jumped on a water taxi and headed across the harbour to a boutique brewer over in the city centre.
Over the six hours, others appeared (word of mouth is an amazing thing) and hidden away in the bowls of a harbour side pub, we all allowed the alcohol and the dark closeness to take us under.

I didn’t score a snog but there were lots of emotional people sobbing into drinks, and hugs.
There were bosses declaring that they weren’t bad people. I told the six foot plus-square jawed-Italian-sky diver, that emotionally he was a five year old, and that he had never suffered (it turned out to be a good call.)
And there was one girl, who was surround by a group of guys, soulfully consoling her about her break up with a boy in the office, who was now dating the blond that had snogged half the guys at last years Christmas party (a group of guys consoling a drunk girl is code for ‘a group of guys jostling to be the one that takes her home.’)
There is something about a work Christmas party, and a release of pressure.

Woke up Saturday morning to find a trail of clothes across the flat leading to the shower.
It was a perfect morning lucky. It’s been really hot the last couple of days, but the sea breeze blew through the flat, cooling my forehead.
Drank lots of water, napped a bit (once on the floor,) wondered down to the rock pools to molest the crabs for a bit.