It’s the time of year when even if you don’t ordinarily have a social life, you kinda do, because it’s work Christmas party season. These kind of Christmas parties are complex entities and are difficult to understand.
Like okay, so you have the Christmas part, which is easy enough. Christmas is the time of year where social norms and Red Cross ads about underprivileged children force people into acknowledging they have an extended family and buying things for other people. Consequently people take this time as an opportunity to get drunk off everything and stay comfortably plastered for most of December. Christmas also means tinsel and singing and lying to young children.
Then there is the party part. This goes well with the Christmas part because they are both heavily comprised of socially accepted over consumption of alcohol.
But then there is the work part. You spend your whole year trying to divorce your work life from your party life. For instance, if you have been out partying and wake up the next day with a hangover you call into work and say, “I have to pick up my Aunty from the airport/my dog is sick/my car is broken.” Not, “I’m hungover as hell and I sure as shit don’t want to have to deal with other human beings today even if I am getting paid for it.” Usually you would prevent your superiors from knowing you are ever drunk and uninhibited for the foundation for employment generally depends on responsibility and reliability. ‘Work Christmas Party’ is one massive friggen paradox and probably only came into existence as a peace offering from employers in an attempt to atone all the ridiculous shit they put you through during the year.
Anyway, due to the quizzical nature of this phenomenon most people who encounter ‘Work Christmas Party’ do not consider the consequences of their actions and end up looser than would ever be deemed appropriate at a work function and proceed to mutilate their reputation. It’s great if you’re not that person, but most of the time, to some extent, you are. And the worst part is, you are not Cinderella and you don’t turn back into the ordinary pumpkin at midnight, you will do the walk of shame Monday morning.
Ways of neutralising your drunken antics, because there is no way of denying or erasing all of them, include:
- Mentioning other people who were more embarrassing than you to make yourself look tame in comparison, but also as threats.
- Pretending you were too drunk to remember.
- Doing everything you are told at work and not play Angry Birds.
- Be nice to people who have dirt on you.
- Pretend you don’t recognise that girl/guy you hooked up with/tell them you are about to be sold into an arranged marriage and needed one last fling before engaging in a loveless union forevermore *tears*.
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