I remember when the annual office holiday party was a bit like the aptly-named bar in that grisly-yet wonderfully-bad movie “From dusk til Dawn” – an endless night in a funky, dark room filled with drunks, debaucheries and more than a little blood by dawn.
Don’t act like you have never been to one of these wretched events of tinseled excess where people were embarrassed, injured, fired or arrested. I saw some of you there.
Several friends began to smile about halfway through my description of these corporate disasters. The annual office or company party around the middle of December was once a thing to behold, and hopefully, from a safe distance.
I have heard about a few large parties where the company rents out a big hotel and everyone gets all dressed up, liquored up, messed up and the alimony and child-support checks pass in the inter-office mail starting in January.
Fireworks erupted in the men’s room at one office function. Real fireworks, as in, cherry bombs and rat chasers.
This is the truth. A friend told me about a company that held it’s festive shindig in a bar across the street from a strip joint. Bound to be a bad ending after just that one sentence. Needless to say, the ugliness soon made like the chicken and crossed the road and the president – after chugging a bottle of holiday cheer – offered a month off for anybody who’d get naked on stage. He nearly had to close the entire operation for a month after everyone except a 63 year-old woman in accounts receivable took him up on his wager. And they had pictures to prove it. She took them. And posted them on the company intranet. They fired her. These things are tough.
If you have never beaten a co-worker senseless or tried to run over that jerk in the third cube down after dipping a couple or twenty eggnogs, then you are probably reading this and wondering how you missed the party. Count your blessings. Legalities shun most episodes of truly rancid behavior these days, but back in the 1980’s, the ritual office Christmas party was anything but a silent or holy night. It was pure tort mayhem.
Falling off a holly-bedecked table was usually just the appetizer. Suggestive and rude comments usually preceded groping, slapping, or some type of martial arts maneuver. Pepper spray might be involved. Little meatballs or cocktail wieners stuffed down someone’s pants? Yeah, seen that. They leave a stain on pants and reputations.
After the name-calling and left hooks abated, things usually settled into a long winter’s night of things no one wanted to remember the next day at the coffee machine. The infamous ‘day-after’ comments usually flowed like rum-spiked sherbet punch:
“I didn’t exactly say that to the boss. I think I just mouthed it, maybe, and someone read my lips out loud.”
“She was wearing a red dress, just like my wife. I swear, I thought it was my wife. She looked a lot different than that big picture of her in the annual report.”
“Oh come on; everyone was dancing. His hood wasn’t dented that bad. Was it?”
“It was dark. His file cabinet looked just like a urinal.”
“We have coverage for that kind of thing, right? Like medical or dental or something with the duck from TV?”
“Officer, the gun was in my sport coat pocket from last year.”
“So how many were fired?”
“Is that chili on my pant’s leg?”
“Her husband is in the lobby?”
Today, things have calmed considerably from those days. Now the office party is so tame no one remembers what happened the next day not because they were torked up on White Russians, but because nothing actually did happen. Gone are the days when attorneys printed up napkins and left them beside the pimento-cheese finger sandwiches.
It’s probably all for the best. No one wants to do the walk of shame between a long aisle of cubicles as people giggle and whisper, “He looks so different with pants on.”
