It’s that time of year again when, depending on your place of work, you may be required to devote several hours of one of your work day towards sucking down eggnog and rum until you end up unconscious and pantsless in the hallway. No, I’m not talking about last Wednesday. I’m talking about Christmas parties. That special time of year where everyone in the office comes together and tries to pretend like they’d be friends if they didn’t happen to come to the same place of work each morning.

In the spirit of the season, I have an annual tradition (since last year) of blogging about my office party. So this year, when trying to think of some new angle to spice up this year’s entry, a thought occurred to me: I have the technology. The know-how. The inner nerdiness. You know what I should do? I should liveblog the agency Christmas party! I’ll set up a blog post, connect to it with my iPod, and then update the post live as the party is going on in real time!

Immediately following this great idea came my next great idea: What are you, retarded?

In case you’re still working your way towards the same epiphany I had, let me help get you there quicker. If Drunk Erik = Stupid Erik, then Drunk Erik + Internet access + intimate work details = Unemployed Erik. And I don’t like Unemployed Erik. He’s too sulky and withdrawn.

So instead, I went to my party and had my fun and have spent the last seven days following it doing not a damn thing. Which brings us to today where, being as I am both sober and in complete control of my facilities, I can liveblog the night’s proceedings with the benefit of self-restraint and censorship of any embaressing details. Provided I can remember what happened. So here goes nothing.

3:00 – As everyone knows, all good Christmas parties should start sometime before the work day ends, which offers the enticement of getting out of work to attend them. Works on me every year.

3:30 – Everyone finally shows up.

3:32 – For those of you paying attention, last year’s Christmas party featured a scavenger hunt where I nobly and heroically cheated my way to victory. This year’s game involves a 54-question quiz asking questions about people in the office and you have to guess which person the question is about. I panic when I realize I haven’t prepared any way to rig this game.

3:35 – The best I come up with is loudly declaring the wrong answer to each question. “Who owned a pet moose as a child? I’m pretty sure THAT WAS SUSAN.” Unfortunately, since I don’t know anything about any of the people I work with, I have no actual way of knowing which answers are wrong and somehow manage to give away the right answer to all fifty-four consecutive questions.

4:00 – I got two answers right. I was the answer to both of them. One of them was a guess.

4:05 – This game unfairly prejudices against people with social anxiety disorders.

4:10 – With the games behind me, I can safely stop acknowledging the personal lives of my co-workers and start drinking. Being that, as I had mentioned earlier, Drunk Erik = Stupid Erik, I plan on doing what I do every year: Get my drinking out of the way at the beginning of the party, then spend the rest of the night slurping down water so I can still drive home at the end of the night. So I started my evening with a rum and coke.

4:12 – I may have forgotten the Coke. Which, as it turns out, is somewhat key.

4:30 – I spend some time enjoying the agency’s spinning conference room. Up until this particular day, I had been unaware that our conforence room could spin.

4:45 – People aren’t quite as excited about my suggestion for an impromptu papier mache contest as I am. On well. There’s always next year.

5:00 – As the work day ends, I am now free to go home, and totally would have if that damn room hadn’t been spinning so fast. I don’t know who thought it was funny to turn the speed up that high, but it wasn’t.

5:25 – Being stuck in conversation, I miss the beginning of the pot luck supper. Once I was free to, I made my way back eager to see if anyone had partook in what I had brought – a handful of peanuts. It’s an old Hagen family recipe.

5:30 – Nobody took any of my peanuts. Ingrates. I had those things in my hand all damn morning.

5:45 – The rum and Coke (no Coke) is the new taste sensation. I have three more and then stop, because my heart was getting kind of palpitatey.

6:00 – When the hell are they going to switch off this room spinner? I feel nauseous.

6:12 – At last year’s party, I TPed everyone’s office after going five whole minutes without anyone paying any attention to me. Not wanting to repeat myself, I switch around everyone’s staplers. Tomorrow, I will come to realize that everyone has the same model of stapler at my office, so this prank wasn’t nearly as clever as I had thought. But still, now everyone had different amounts of staples than they had the previous day, so WHO’S LAUGHING NOW, UNIVERSE? Yeah, that’s right. I am.

6:27 – Our P.R. Director steals the cell phone of our Director of Regional Operations. Not feeling this is in itself a good enough prank, I helpfully write a note for him to leave in place of the phone. The note reads as follows:

To find your phone,
You must look
Underneath
The pirate’s hook.

-RRRRrrrrr

Don’t ask me what that was supposed to mean. I still have no clue.

6:35 – Sensing it was approaching time to get off of Mr. Toad’s Magical Ride, I begin my water drinking routine. Most people are not aware of this, but if you do cease drinking at a certain point and hydrate yourself, the water molecules push the alcohol molecules right out of your system. It’s a scientific fact. I’m pretty sure I saw it on Nova one time.

6:45 – Do you know what the drawback of sobering up during a party is? I’ll tell you. Primarily, you progressively become less and less funny and charming and more and more wary of the fact that, holy crap, everyone else here is drunk out of their minds and may be capable of killing me.

7:00 – Quality time spent hiding under my desk.

7:30 – Having regained my faculties, I can now appreciate the fact that though I myself am no longer as funny as I thought I was earlier, everyone else is freaking hilarious. It almost makes me sorry about the whole stapler thing. Almost.

7:45 – Pirate’s hook? What the hell was that supposed to mean?

8:00 – A time comes at every office party when you decide you should get out while you still can. For me, it’s when I realize that The Office Christmas party episode is on and you’d rather be watching that than at your own actual Christmas party. Over the years, I have perfected the art of the sneak-out down to a science. One minute, you may see me at the party and the next, I’m already halfway home. I’m just that damned good.

8:05. Unfortunately for me, the crowds have all congregated around my office at both exits, cutting off all means of escape. I try to figure out how hard I would have to hit the window for it to break, and if any snow piles in the parking lot are sufficiently fluffy enough to bear my weight.

8:15 – I cut a couple of crude eyeholes in a cardboard box and start inching my wall down the hallway. The eyeholes are, unfortunately, a bit too crude and I end up in the women’s bathroom. If I could make it just one year without somehow ending up in the women’s bathroom.

8:30 – I decide to go for the direct route and just grab my things and go. Halfway down the hall, I can hear my co-workers yelling my name. Time to run.

8:45 – Back home and rewinding the DVR. Have to pee. A lot.

Keep in mind I wrote this a week after the fact, so not all details are spot on. Also, I think I might have fought a dragon at one point, but I didn’t recall precisely what time it occurred, thus I left it out for the sake of accuracy.