Office parties are dangerous to your job

WITH any luck Christmas will arrive before I die, but it’s going to be close.

There are three days to go, by my reckoning, and there are still 38 office parties and business celebrations to attend. This being the weekend it means I’m going to have to cram them all into Monday.

I don’t know who invented the end-of-year office party, but he was a mere child in the face of the genius who dreamed up Christmas, thus bringing all the festivities to a sudden stop.

There are New Year parties, of course, but they are purely domestic affairs and do not carry the potential for pain of an office party.

I swear if I am forced to digest just one more unidentifiable, greasy, battered little triangle, or hand-rolled (yuk!) ball of indeterminate spiced something-or-other my liver will shut down completely.

The only reason it hasn’t already is because these vicious little canapés are being dissolved in the vat of red wine of malicious vintage that has, in kindlier seasons, been called my stomach.

But we all know that office parties are dangerous to your health – what we lose sight of is that they are also dangerous to your job.

Most of us will recover from the gargantuan hangovers brought on by a carton of stubbies with chateau cardboard chasers; most of us will manage to dash from the manager’s office to the photocopying room at least, before we return the canapés to the world as they left it… more or less.

But you can never recover from telling the managing director how you admire his toupee. This is true whether he has one or not.

And when your biggest client is pouring out his heart to you (while he pours in the bourbon) with tales of his wife’s infidelity, you will not later be blessed with bigger contracts if you agree with him that his wife is a prize cow that you wouldn’t look at if you were marooned on a desert island with her and an orang-utan. A male orang-utan.

He may cry on you shoulder (the valued client, not the male orang-utan); he may on the night admire your sagacity; but when business reopens on January 2 his tone will be as festive as the electric chair and within 24 hours you’ll be facing an interview with the managing director about your prospects with the company.

Do not look at his toupee!

Happily the world has created an entirely natural antidote to the office-party disease; a kind of damage limitation device to stop the entire business community self-destructing in the space of three weeks.

It’s called Christmas.

You can sack a man who has just told you that, frankly, he’d make a better chairman than you, and who has then vomited in your lap, if his only excuse was an office party. But a Christmas office party…?

Even Scrooge wouldn’t have the nerve.