I’m starting a new work thing next week, and so it was quite nice yesterday to receive a couple of emails from my new boss and another soon-to-be colleague confirming a meeting this Friday.
Great, I thought, they seem to be a nicely organised and efficient outfit, and these emails strike a thoroughly friendly and convivial tone. I’m looking forward to working with them. They seem like lovely people.
So far so positive.
I then checked my phone a while later, and was surprised to see a calendar invitation from a woman I have never heard of, with the vague and innocuous-sounding title ‘Dinner and Drinks’. That’s odd, I thought, probably a mistake.
And then it started.
A barrage of messages relating to said calendar invitation from what seemed like thousands of strangers. Who are these people? I shouted in my head. Why do they want me to have dinner with them?
Eventually, I figured it out. This was the arranging of a Work Do. I had been invited to a Work Do. Next Thursday. For a job I haven’t even started yet.
How did this make me feel, I hear you ask. Keen to get my social butterfly on and make some new friends? Sure, a bit. Slightly worried that this level of advanced planning was a tad over-zealous and looked suspiciously like organised fun? Yes, certainly. Struck with a weird sense of impending doom and deja vu? Most definitely.
For this isn’t the first time that this situation has arisen. This exact scenario occurred in 2003, and it did not go well. Curiouser and curiouser, I hear you observe, intrigued.
Back in my first real job, when I was a young whippersnapper fresh out of university, I worked in the cut-throat world of academic bookselling. And on Day One of this exciting employment, it transpired that the ridiculously early Regional Christmas Do was coming up that Thursday, and two people were mysteriously unable to attend at the last minute, and would me and the other new kid Kris like to come along?
Kris, lucky bastard, had a prior engagement, but I foolishly accepted the offer. Indeed, I was quite looking forward to it. Isn’t it funny that sometimes you can be so wrong?
The whole thing was a mad nightmare.
It took place at a pub in Nottingham which has a real barge and part of the canal running through it like some kind of water feature. In my experience, open water inside public places filled with drunk people is a whole list of accidents waiting to happen. Several poor staff-members spent the whole night patiently steering said drunk people away from the barge. Apart from the one who seemed to be running a book on which inebriate would be the first to fall in.
The Do itself turned out to be one of those awful all-inclusive affairs, where several companies each book a table, and you get your seasonal festive dinner and an evening’s ‘entertainment’ (for this, read crap crackers, crap DJ and crap dancing). Although, it was quite fun to bond with 2 of my colleagues (both named Sarah), as we slagged off the other companies’ dance-floor activities and took advantage of the open bar.
I learned an eye-opening amount about my new colleagues that night. There was the unfortunate lady who had cycled 20 miles to get there in the pissing rain, because her partner Colin, a mean crazy hoarder, had gone back on his promise (made 3 months before) to give her a lift.
Then there was the muppet Trainee Manager, your basic knobhead whose personality was a rubbish combination of sinfully boring and inordinately bossy. It’s true; the next week, he insisted we spend an entire afternoon adjusting poster positions until he considered them satisfactorily perpendicular.
And then there was Julie.
I had spent a pleasant afternoon with Julie earlier in the week, labelling sale-stock and building vast pyramids of cheap art books, during the course of which I learned quite a bit about her holiday home in the Dordogne, her grown-up sons, and the best place to get a manicure in Nottingham. She seemed a lovely woman, who worked a few afternoons a week primarily to fund her trips to the nail-salons of the East Midlands.
And yet she chose to spend this evening drinking her own bodyweight in Sauvignon Blanc and getting impressively, uproariously, shitfaced.
She went to the Men’s toilets. Several times. And told us all about it. Every time.
She accosted our Manager, backed him up against a wall, and then railed at him for 40 minutes about how he was basically the worst manager in the history of the world and was solely responsible for running the company into the ground, prodding him forcefully in the shoulder all the while.
And then she cornered mild-mannered, ex-RAF pilot Toby, the strapping 25-year-old delivery driver, and tried to take him home with her.
Like I said, impressively shitfaced.
Eventually, Toby apparently poured her into a cab and, we assumed, she went home.
But that was the last that anyone ever saw of her. She evidently came round the next morning, could remember enough of the night before to be completely mortified, and couldn’t bear to see any of us ever again. We were quietly informed in the next week’s staff briefing that Julie had decided not to pursue her career in part-time bookselling.
So, you see, this ‘Dinner and Drinks’ that I’ve been invited to next Thursday, seemingly a friendly and happy little get-together, is fraught with dangerous possibility.
I’ve tentatively accepted, but if a barge is even remotely involved, I’m leaving.
