The dreaded office outing…
Mike’s employer is having it again this year. We don’t know what date it’s gonna be yet, but we’ve decided that we have baseball tickets for that day. If we don’t actually have any, I’ll buy some. At least one of the zillion minor league teams around here has to be in town on any given weekend!
The thing last year was a family-friendly event, where everyone could bring their kids, and they all went to some restaurant in Newport, RI. I forget what else they did. In my experience, in office party parlance, *family friendly* means that it is fun for the kids, but sucks for everyone else. I’ve been to enough of these shindigs in my life to know how that works. So we didn’t go to the thing last year (turned out that we really did have baseball tickets), and we won’t be going this year.
I hate office parties in general. We don’t even go to the adults only holiday party. Okay, we went to one, when they had it at a nice Italian restaurant. It was back in 2004, I know this because I remember talking to the guys about the Red Sox winning the World Series. I hardly talked to the women at all; the only thing they talked about was their kids and their activities, schools, etc. These women all seemed to know each other, they didn’t work there, they were the wives of guys who worked for the company. I had absolutely nothing in common with them, and they seemed very clique-ish, anyway.
But then they started having the holiday parties at flashy nightclubs, well, as flashy as they have down in Providence, RI. Whatever…it’s jut not our thing. I liked the restaurant better, but I guess that wasn’t flashy enough for the boss.
I often wish that companies would just do away with these stupid parties, and just divvy up the money and give it to the employees as a bonus. It’s clear that these wives hang out together on their own time, but we really don’t socialize with any of these people at all. Mike works with them, they’re nice enough people, but he doesn’t feel compelled to hang out with them. We’d just rather do our own thing on the weekends.
There’s a whole bunch of guys in his office, the boss included, who are mad for soccer. They get together to play it, and sometimes they go down to Foxboro for a New England Revolution game. Mike has been invited to a few of the Revs games, but he’s always been able to produce actual baseball tickets as proof that he can’t make it. He doesn’t want to come right and say that he doesn’t like soccer and doesn’t want to go…but having prior plans always works.
I’ve worked for places that give you all sorts of shit for not going to the office party, not being a *team player* and all that. Luckily, Mike’s company is not one of these places, so once again we get to avoid the Romper Room outing, and anything else they decide to do. As long as he shows up for work and does his job, they don’t care if you don’t want to hang out after hours. That’s the way it SHOULD be.
