9 December 2004
Office Parties
Twenty-one facts about office parties.
- The date of your work Christmas do is directly related to how you can expect your company to perform in the coming year. If your company has its bash before the first week of December, they're taking advantage of cheap deals, and may go under. Beware.
- If it has its shindig in the week before Christmas, none of the executive board have social lives, and the company has too much money, which they are spending lavishly. Beware.
- If your works do is held in January, you probably already know that pink slips will be handed out at the cloakroom when you leave. Sorry.
- Likewise, venue can be very revealing. Bashes held in the back room of the pub where the landlord usually keeps his boxes of Big D nuts do not bode well, though at least the alcohol will be plentiful and cheap.
- Parties in venues which you usually wouldn't be allowed into - glitzy bars for beautiful people, exclusive west end members' clubs - mean that you will not be able to afford a round after the bar tab runs dry.
- Bashes held on boats, buses, trains or other forms of transport indicate that you will most likely spill your drink.
- Sometimes, people who work in pubs have their own Christmas staff bash in a pub - either their own, or another. This is acceptable. Sometimes managers decide to throw the party in the office. This is less acceptable, and more open to health and safety transgressions, but it is still just on the right side of acceptable if your company has less than twenty employees.
- If, however, you work in any of the following, and the boss decides to hold the soiree in the workplace - or another location exactly like your workplace - it's really time you got a new job: IKEA, school, sewage works, prison, swimming pool.
- Clothing is important. Perhaps more important than attire for other parties, because at your work do, you do not want to pull and you do not want to be the person everyone remembers for tumbling down the stairs in her platforms. Avoid hotpants, boob tubes, anything pleather, and garments with a neckline cut to the navel. It can only end in tears.
- Yes, there will be a free bar for at least some of the night. No, you must not drink it dry. Let's go over that again: yes, there will be free alcohol available, but you should at all costs avoid the temptation to try and avail yourself of it. You have not just wandered out of the Sahara. You are at a work thing, and if you get plastered you will regret it. Fact.
- You may not want to go. This may be acceptable to you, your friends, your family, your mum, your cat, your neighbours and your friendly neighbourhood bus driver, but your work colleagues will be strangely unable to comprehend how this could possibly be. Do not try to reason with them, or explain that you would rather boil your left foot in acid than spend five minutes in the same room as [insert name here] from [insert department here]. Just say yes, you're going, and then somehow lose them on the way to the venue.
- Some workplaces will insist on making the party "themed" which is a slightly less intimidating way of saying "fancy dress". Themes vary from eras (seventies, twenties, sixties, etc) to cultures (Bollywood, Wild West, Hawaiian, etc) and can even include such hazy concepts as "heroes and heroines" or "Hollywood."
- The theme is usually picked by the assistant of someone relatively senior in your office, and the decision will be made entirely on the basis of whether the individual in question has a costume that really really suits them. Hence, they will show up in a perfect black and white vinyl go-go outfit, and everyone else will look like an extra from Woodstock: the charity shop reunion.
- Be aware that if your company decides to have a party with any of the following costume themes, you should suddenly develop scabies: "west belfast"; "teenagers today"; "pimps and hookers" OR "vicars and tarts"; "slough"; "eighties sportswear"; "philosophers"; "politicians".
- You mustn't throw up. No, really, you mustn't.
- If you really must, then for god's sake get someone other than the head of finance to hold your hair out of your face while you do.
- And don't do it in anyone's handbag. It's either yours or someone really really important and with the power to fire you.
- The next morning, you must be in work.
- Even if you are hit by a bus on the way home from the party.
- Or you catch plague.
- If you phone in sick with creeping broken leg death of doom, no-one will believe you. Even if you phone from casualty, or get a doctor to phone for you, or an undertaker. No-one will believe you are not hungover. Not even if you are teetotal, or weren't even at the party. Sorry.
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