BEYOND THE IMPLODE 3 - BRITISH AIRWAYS 0

Ritual Landscape and Betty's Utility Room blogs (turn right, click on the links, what did your last slave die of?) dissect the mundane horror of work Xmas parties. We had ours last week and it was crap, even though I ended up texting and ringing a load of people at 2am - as sure a sign of being a pissed up idiot as waking up with your clothes still on, to greet the 5am repeat of 'Countdown'.

I've always been quite well behaved at these sort of events, ironically. Well, apart from the year I threw beer in a bouncer's face and narrowly escaped a kicking (it was meant as a joke! some people....). Or the year I ended up singing on a traffic island at 3am. But that's smallfry compared to the time we stole a hoover from an art student's party and got arrested for destroying someone's garden fence....but anyway....

The sad thing about these parties is that you can never REALLY start raising hell, as your bosses are still hovering around. Some people at our place didn't let this put them off, however. There was a woman, nicknamed 'The Owl' by longer-serving staffers (I never found out why) whose claim to notoriety was that she'd been fucking the editor of an industrial mining magazine the very same night his wife was giving birth. She was quite attractive, but had a permanent disapproving pout (still didn't look like an owl, though). She'd just put a co-worker through a tribunal for alleged sexual harrassment - I really don't know anything about what happened, but he won it and kept his job. Whether or not he was as sexist as she claimed is uncertain, but he was definitely a grade-A moron, as he decided to get slaughtered at the Xmas party, two days after the hearing, approach her, and scream "You fucking cow!", before punching her and knocking her arse over tit. Strangely enough, he didn't get fired, and is currently doing well in another company at time of writing.

I also remember one painfully dull Xmas do, held in an ex-strip bar in Hoxton, which was basically a basement with mirrored walls. I can't remember why, but there was some sort of aggro between two salespeople over a girl. After they got chucked out, we were relating the incident to some people who'd missed it, and I happened to refer to one of the pissed-up pugilists as a 'gorilla'. This girl stopped, gave me a pure evil look, and said, "What...you mean a black guy?"

Mother of pearl, what is it with some people? Still, half our directors were pretending they were record company execs - I've never heard such exagerrated sniffing sounds coming from toilet cubicles in all my years. This is what it really takes to get through an Xmas party. Ban them all, ban them all, the whole sorry lot of them.