Our place is very staid & mature (?) compared to these high jinks. We were given an option to have a firm wide summer OR Christmas party & summer won out. It was held, naturally enough, in high summer when half the place was on holidays. A very tame BBQ with a few drink tokens so it was. So no group Christmas party but we’re having individual team lunches. But it was decided by a couple of people on my team that Christmas is already busy enough so let’s have it in January as something to look forward to when everybody else is glum. I was mildly irked, as Christmas needs to be celebrated at Christmas. I can picture us sitting around a table sharing work banter stories in an otherwise empty Cafe En Seine or somewhere at around 4.37pm on 16th January. Children’s Christmas party in the office next week though & the same poor fucker has to be Santa every year as he’s pleasant, over 50 & has a beard.
Your work sound like fierce tight cunts
I’ve never had a boozy Christmas party ever. I’ve been in workplaces that have been quite small and didn’t do parties. My current place of employment has generally just seen people go for drinks (nothing free) and a few years when I was living out the peninsula, I just drove in. Then we had Covid years. Last year I couldn’t make it and this year I’m on antibiotics that’ll lead to vomiting and/or hospitalisation if I’m mixing with booze. I think it’s for the best all the same. While our crowd would be tame enough, you still don’t want to be doing anything too stupid in front of colleagues.
We won’t even get a tin of biscuits for Christmas. Bloody public sector.
Only a decade or so to go until you can take over. You’d want to take a few years off the running in advance and focus more on lifting pints and eating carvery dinners.
Every € has to be signed off, it’d be funny if it wasn’t so bureacratic. I recently had to send an email justifying choosing one travel option that was €1.89 (one euro eighty-nine cent) dearer than an alternative.
There was another good one recently, or at least I thought it was. We can get taxis from the airport AFTER 8pm if we’re travelling back from meetings. A colleague arrived back into DUB a bit before 8pm, but usual time taken walking through terminal, past passport check & down to rank. Hopped in a taxi around 7.55pm & got home 20/30 mins later, took the receipt from the taxi driver & included it in expenses - it said start 7.55pm & end 8.15pm or thereabouts. That part of the claim was denied, as they got in the taxi before 8pm & would have been expected to use public transport!
My place is a very small operation. We normally take whoever is working for us and throw them in the back of the berlingo with a slab of cans, a few bottles of whiskey and a load of fags/weed. Anything else they have to provide themselves. I drive round the place stopping occasionally and they can get out and stretch their legs or have a shit in a bush. Id have xmas fm on full blast (you need to cos one speaker can be dodgy) Its kind of like one of those mystery bus tours. I think they love it.
We had the big do last Friday and I endured taking my team out for dinner last night. Relieved it’s all over.
Ah here.
That’s just ridiculous carry on. Did he fight his case on it?
I find work events as tedious as anyone but giving a choice between a summer bbq or Christmas party seems extreme.
I actually got with my wife for the first time at a Big Four Christmas party. Who knows, If that had been a summer bbq i could have ended up with Bridie from facilities instead.
This first Christmas Party I had right out of College saw me in the place only a few weeks and a free bar. It went exactly as you could imagine. I was manyanas drunk, but thankfully there was one fella who chatted up a directors wife (the fact that she was gamey didnt help him), called another an igorant fucker from Meath and had to crash with a co worker when he was too drunk to remember where he lived.
Once you have one fella worse than you, you’ll be grand. I minded myself ever since that night though.
I skip the big work do every year. There’s zero to be gained but a lot to be lost.
Small team dinner midweek. Made my excuses after 2 hours and let the mainly wimmin folk at it.
I was put in a cell at 20 for what was my first Christmas do… Older chaps had us out at 4pm. In a cell by 12am. A lovely life lesson.
No charges, just the shame of walking home with no laces.
Sounds great.
I forgot that one of the years I was working for myself, I decided to give myself a Christmas party (for one).
Met some friends up in Dublin. Went to Cedar Tree, pints, gig, pints and I think a Zaytoon to end it off.
A great night out. Should have put it up against the tax returns
Mayorstone?
No. Henry street.
Papa Cauli would have made you a cup of tea if it was Mayorstone.
I got a clip around the ear instead 
Christ my younger days as a trainee accountant around Christmas time was carnage. Overall party, partner party, sub group party, not to mention drinking yourselves practically every night of the week.
I used Christmas Day for recovering.
That has all stopped now. It was of a certain time and when I was of a certain age.
The low mood people experience in January is linked to their over indulgence weeks and months earlier… grand when younger but not for the middle aged