I've been to quite a few employees' Christmas meals while
working for quite a few different companies in the last thirty years. We've
eaten in corporate boardrooms, football grounds, posh hotels, small family
restaurants and quiet, specially reserved upstairs rooms in pubs. The quality
of food has varied wildly from almost gourmet quality to stuff I’d be ashamed to
have cooked myself.
And, sorry to say, I've seen food fights in just about all
of them. I've never personally been involved, you understand. It's only through
other people that I know that an empty party popper filled with black pepper
and plugged with a cold sprout makes an excellent and rather explosive missile.
Allegedly.
All of the places that I worked had one thing in common.
Whether they were small, family run businesses or multi-national corporate
behemoths every one of them had put a little - and in some cases a heck of a
lot of - cash behind the bar, paying for the employees' drinks for their
Christmas celebration. The money always ran out far too early but that didn't
stop us from making the most of it. Without exception every single work's do
that I've ever been on has descended into drunken carnage. Every last one. It
was seen as a kind of stress relief for the under-pressure workers at the
bottom of the corporate food chain, as was the occasional sight of
newly-connected couples sloping away from proceedings when they thought that
nobody was looking. Naturally they were never as invisible as their
beer-fuddled brains thought, much to everyone else's delight the next day at
work.
Now I'm not condoning these events of alcoholic hedonism,
I'm just stating the honest facts. That's what has happened at the office
parties I've attended. They've not always been fun but they've always been
memorable and since becoming self-employed I have missed the camaraderie that
these kind of events reinforced among the workforce. Being a sole trader I
don't have that day to day banter at the drinks machine, that social
intercourse that cements workplace relationships. What I do have is lunch with
my Beloved every day which is infinitely better, but it would still be nice to
have a work's Christmas do.
So this week I arranged one. Not that I officially employ
anyone these days, I don't think that my writing income will ever stretch to
that, but I do pay people for work occasionally. Mostly the aforementioned
Beloved, my primary proof-reader and muse, but occasionally others get
reimbursed for their reading and suggestions. I made a few phone calls and one
afternoon this week a few of us gathered at a local Toby Carvery. Hey, if I'm
paying then I get to pick what and where, and I've never been one for fancy
food. Make it simple and plentiful and I'm happy. Suffice to say that it was
and I was. The people with me were happy too. We had old fashioned roast
dinner, a couple of beers, a lot of fun chat and (best of all in my book) there
were no silly party hats.
And there was no food fight and the only people who went
home together at the end of it were me and my Beloved.
Result.
© Shaun Finnie 2013
No comments:
Post a Comment