work dinner

Tonight I went to a work ‘thank you’ dinner. Now for some people the distinction between work life and social life has been blurred by the practice of ‘Friday-night-work-drinks’. I know of one particular gentleman, who drinks at every possible work occasion (corporate lunches, afternoon meetings etc.), the ‘work-drinks’, in fact, being a complete summation of his social life. The combination of regular inebriation and festivity during work hours seems like the kind of blessing that many nine-to-fivers pray daily for. However, we have deep concerns that he may be bordering on alcoholism. In fact his alcohol abuse is more specifically, a situational alcoholism that leads to frequent binge-drinking. He is at threat of cirrhosis of the liver before the age of thirty.

I think I’ve worked out the possible solution to this life threatening lifestyle choice.

One should keep a strict limit on socialising with work colleagues.

This may be briefly outlined for two main reasons.

1. Let’s face it, you have to see these people everyday for a large portion of your waking hours and unlike friends, you don’t choose them and they don’t choose to be with you. There’s only so much you can have in common with these arbitrarily grouped number of individuals. You can’t be talking about work all the time, it’s just depressing.
2. A workplace is fraught with politics, bitching and back-stabbing. Even the most gracious and neutral of workers (such as Yours Truly) are not immune to the entirely natural development of petty grievances and intense enmity that arises from being in close quarters with others for long periods of time.

Faced with dealing with them outside the office, with no photocopier to complain about or a water-cooler to stand around, one is directly challenged with the two problems of e.g. (related to reasons above and saying X is a particular work colleague)

1. You have nothing to say to X, as you know nothing about him.
2. You find X utterly repugnant because you have discovered he never flushes the toilet.

There’s nothing one can do to overcome these prejudicial feelings or plain indifference, than to loosen up with the world’s oldest social lubricant, booze. In the case, of a whole organisation, end-of-year get-together, one will be needing a lot of it.

So, I imagine you can guess the state I was in last night. The doubly exposed and out-of-focus image of Nicole and I being a rather accurate depiction of the evening.