Ruining The Company Reputation

Well it was a long weekend, and I'd rather not try and cram it all into one post, so first...Friday night. We spent all afternoon at the Opera House for an off-site, which meant we had to pay our dues and talk about "strategy" and "planning" for the coming financial year. Which wasn't so bad, although I started to get a bit testy when I realized it was 5pm on a Friday and I was stone cold sober.

However, we made up for that.

Once we were all finished there, we headed down to the bar, opened a tab on a company card, and got started. Within a couple of hours, some of my colleagues were drunker than I'd ever seen them before, meaning things went from silly fun to rather weird and uncomfortable. The highlight reel:

• Me and Chronster tearing up the dancefloor while she stole cupcakes for me that had been left out on the bar. All fun and games until she didn't put the cover back on the tray correctly and everything ended up scattered all over the place.
• The guy who got married three weeks ago making out with someone who definitely wasn't his new bride. We had to send him home to his lucky, lucky woman.
• An extremely candid discussion of phone sex. Or perhaps more of a debate between those of the team who were experienced advocates and those who kept saying "What do you mean by phone sex?", as if anyone actually meant copulation with an actual phone. Playing dumb isn't cute, kids. You're probably a professional phone sex operator.
• A member of the team being found somewhat incapacitated in the women's bathroom, and being led away by paramedics (which may have been a bit dramatic, she's fine)
• One of our analysts deciding to sit down at the drum set and play along with the DJ's music -- until the band ran over (probably upset that he was playing better than they were), followed by security who told us all to "finish our drinks and leave".
• Things might have ended better if we hadn't walked out one door and back in through the other one to order another round of drinks, but hey, we thought we could get away with it considering we had racked almost two grand up on the tab. Apparently not, and we were asked to leave again, a little more sternly.
• Stopped by McDonald's before heading home, which wasn't that notable except for the fact that half of the people there didn't actually remember it until we mentioned it this morning.

I think being kicked out of the bar was really a result of a culmination of all of those events, since playing the drums generally isn't that much of an offense. Although we were rather amused that this is the second time our team has been kicked out of a bar because of an incident involving a drum set. Rock on.