Ooh look there’s yer one from the 3rd floor…

Time is nearly upon us folks. November is drawing to a close, and pretty soon Leeson St and Baggot St will be crawling with besuited assholes with their ties around their heads while they try to fight off the waves of apres kebab nausea long enough to get a feel of the drunk girl form Accounts tits before she gets into a cab and goes home.

Office Christmas Parties. Don’t you just love them?

You may be surprised to hear that One For The Road is not a fan. You force yourself into work every day, make small talk with a load of people who you wouldn’t normally give the time of day to, you do your job and you go home. Then every week or so, they pay you. That’s all work should be. None of this socializing. None of this going for lunch in actual restaurants with your ‘colleagues’ during the day. These people are not your friends. You don’t need them to be your friends. I think I’ve gone to two of these forced nights of festivity in my life, and regretted them both, instantly. I am now an expert in making excuses. I just say “I’m not going because they’re always shit”.

But maybe thats just me. Or is it?

Some day over the next week the ugly troll who runs the social committee (has there ever been a more oxymoronic name for anything, ever?) will send you some cheeseball email, complete with a cartoon sprig of holly and a shit photo of Santa Claus that has been stretched beyond recognition to fit the margins of the mail, inviting you to pay €50 to go to some restaurant over a lap dancing club on Leeson St, eat some shit food, and then get wildly drunk in Bucky McSpunkys or Sacky O’Tool’s bar downstairs.

And it’ll be on a Thursday so you can’t even stay in bed the next day.

And you will be forced to go by the gay fella who you know fancies you because he pretends he’s not gay around you and talks constantly about riding women, although he gets all the terminology wrong and talks about “sucking on 6 inch nipples” as if this is a good thing and not a bit gay at all.

And you will go.

And it will be shit.

The dinner will be 2 hours of uncomforable silence punctuated by old jokes you’ve heard every day since you were fucking born, and people doing impressions of yer man off Gift Grub or whatever it is doing an impression of Roy Keane. And your boss will be bleating on about something funny that happened with some guy you’ve never heard of and you just stare blankly and say “ha ha” when prompted.

Then you will get insanely drunk, start chatting up the only decent looking woman in the place, get a quick wear up against the wall of some seedy Leeson St bar thats full of middle aged men hiding their wedding rings and acting as if they’re on a “golfing weekend” in Prague , and then you will go home.

And then you will wish you had the balls to actually kill yourself.

So as a respite to all of you who, like me, hate this kind of shit, I will be posting a link to the map for the legendary “Twelve Pubs Of Christmas” once the mysterious man who draws up the list form his castle in the Dublin Mountains makes it available.

Believe me, you’ll much rather go on the Twelve Pubs with a load of strangers.

Keep your eyes peeled. And the 15th free.

~ by oftroad on November 22, 2007.