Or: How To Give Your Employees The Finger
And Make Them Thank You For It.
I’ve been in the corporate workplace for about eight years now. In that time I’ve been to a number of Christmas parties, ranging from the elaborate to the absent. I’ve been to lavish black-tie parties in DC where the dot-com I worked for blew at least twice the month’s VC money on top-shelf liquor and four-star food. I’ve been to parties that made me feel like I was at my high school prom, that incredible waste of $1,200, one night of my life, and two cases of good beer at the schmaltzy Rye Playhouse. I’ve been to a kegger where the christmas bonus was a black personalized M-65 field jacket. Each one of these was strange in its own way, but the unease was offset by a general desire to have a good time, or at least decent food and drink.
Jen has been coming home with frightening stories about her office, and I’ve found that the only true antidote for the situation is patient understanding and gallons of vodka tonic. So it was with great curiousity/trepidation that I put my suit on and drove us both to the glamorous Brooklyn Comfort Inn, in whose banquet hall her company party awaited us. Entering the building, passing the smoke-filled bar, we found the dining room, where someone had hung great gold dildoes from the ceiling and wrapped the pictures on the wall with green paper in some freakish parody of ‘festive spirit’. The employees gathered around in the center of the room by the bar like nervous antelope while the hotel staff arranged our food in stations around the room. The senior citizen DJ spun Christmas songs and contemplated suicide in the back corner.
After sampling some of our drinks from the bar, and realizing they had replaced the liquid in the bottle marked ‘Smirinoff’ with paint thinner, we plunged into the fray and met with some of Jen’s co-workers. They all seemed very nice, if not a little in shock, and I listened as they passed gossip about people who were and weren’t there. We sat over by the dance floor and contemplated the food selection: a table with a huge pile of baked potatoes, some limp, wet and alien-looking bacon, a huge lake of sickly Velveeta, and a bowl of cut butter the size of a child’s fist. Seriously, if I need that much butter for anything besides an entire Thanksgiving turkey, I’m going to be dead by age 40. There was a table near us with two kinds of store-bought pasta, three choices of sauce that smelled (and tasted) like burning, and a basket of small rolls with no butter in sight. Over on the other side of the room was a bowl of redneck Caesar salad—premixed iceberg lettuce, Stouffer’s croutons, and enough cheese to sink a battleship—some form of cat or dog meat in the role of asian chicken, and another huge tureen of stuff I couldn’t identify.
At this point, the antifreeze in the drink was making us dizzy, so Jen and I tried to choke some of the shit food down. She had about half a bite of the ‘pasta’ and looked at me with the “please hold out your hands so that I may vomit in them” face. Unfortunately I was also searching for a place to hurl, and so I could not help her in her time of need. I ditched our full plates and waited for them to start the ‘prize wheel’, which was run by a pair of hookers (seriously, when you’re wearing the kind of three-inch heels that are held on your legs by those ribbons that reach halfway up your thigh, you’re one of two things: a porno actress or a whore) and took about three years to finish. Prizes ranged from a $100 certificate to Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse—not a bad haul—to a $10 coupon for McDonald’s. Now really, if you’re going to give me $10 to go to McDonald’s, you might as well just kick me in the nuts, because I’d rather feel that pain than try to act happy when you give me the fucking prize. Jen won $15 to a restaurant in Owings Mills that makes the worst sushi in Baltimore.
About the time Jen went to give her boss the department Christmas gift, I wandered back to the dessert table to find something to dilute the burbling pool of sick in my stomach, and found some cake with the wax paper still in between the machine-cut slices. At this point I was pretty shocked that they didn’t leave the box out on the table next to it, but I figured that processed chemicals would make a nice counterpoint to the splitting headache the liquor gave me, so I had a slice. Jen and I then decided it was time to leave to go find some real food, so we got our coats and scurried out the door before anyone else could walk over to bore the shit out of us. In the bar by the door we ran into a knot of partygoers furiously drinking and smoking and were held up by some bunny with bloodshot eyes and, like, the word ‘like’ between, like, every other, like, word in her, like, vocabulary. I grabbed Jen at the point when her hand was forming a fist to strike and we ran to the car to get home for leftover pizza and real alcohol.
What a fucking joke.
Fun links. We now return to seizure robots. Words can not describe. Ding! Fries are done. I’m going to hell. Badger! Mushroom! Snake! Don’t ask me why.