Not all places of work have an Office Christmas Party. Some, including my own this year, have an Office Christmas Meal instead. A meal is a lot easier to organise than a party, although not generally quite so drunken and debauched. Having attended my OCM this week, here are ten tips to help you survive yours.
1) Never organise the meal yourself: Somebody has to do it, but you'll not gain any friends by organising it yourself. Whichever sort of restaurant you pick - French, Chinese, Indian or whatever - somebody won't be happy and will tell you so, repeatedly, for the next six months. Let somebody else organise things, and then you can slag off their choice along with everyone else.
2) Don't eat lunch beforehand: Office Christmas Meals tend to be scheduled to start during work time, usually mid-afternoon. This allows those with childcare arrangements to participate fully in their work colleagues' social life. It also allows restaurants to fill their tables before the evening rush begins, so expect to be chucked out by seven. It's also a bloody silly time for an enormous meal. So don't eat lunch beforehand.
3) Plan your arrival carefully: The next three hours depend on you arriving at the restaurant with your favourite workmates. Not the boring bloke from accounts, not the tedious secretary from the third floor, and most definitely not your immediate line manager. You really don't want to end up sitting next to them for the entire meal, not with all their boring conversations about work and recycling targets and work and Pink Floyd's back catalogue and yet more work. Make sure you sit at a completely different table and surround yourself with your interesting workmates, the life and soul of the party. Arrive with care.
4) Remember what you ordered: The Office Christmas Meal is always planned far too many weeks in advance. Somewhere in October an officious email will come round with a pdf menu attached, demanding that you select starter, main course and dessert RIGHT NOW because there's a deposit to be paid. And now it's December, and you're sitting in a restaurant under pressure from a stern waitress who's demanding to know who ordered the salmon mousse. C'mon, c'mon! And whose is the soup, and who wanted wild mushroom tartlets? Avoid embarrassment, print out your sent email before you arrive.
5) Don't wear that paper party hat: Look, there's a cheap cracker on the table. It's the restaurant's sole nod towards making this a festive meal, and it contains the usual embarrassing pink/green paper hat. Whatever you do don't place this hat on your head, not even for a minute. Everybody has a camera on their mobile phone these days, and your festive plonker moment will no doubt be captured, uploaded and shared on the office intranet tomorrow morning. Don't let this happen to you.
6) Eat, drink and be merry: Come on, this is the one occasion during the year when your company actually wants you to enjoy yourself, and is paying for the privilege. Order the most expensive stuff you can get away with (especially the wine), because tomorrow you'll be back at your desk trimming down budget forecasts again.
7) Try to keep the conversation flowing: It's difficult isn't it? These aren't the people you'd normally choose to spend a social evening with, they're just a random selection of people who Human Resources have deemed work in the same department as you. You have virtually nothing in common. They know nothing about your interests and you care nothing about theirs. Stick to the usual safe conversational topics (house prices, holiday arrangements, children's TV programmes) and you should make it through.
8) Go to the toilet before you arrive: You didn't, did you? And now all that free wine has trickled through your digestive system to your bladder and is waiting, nay begging, to be released. So it's not good that you're sitting in a seat jammed in the far corner, right up against the wall, trapped behind the chairs of four other semi-drunken colleagues who aren't going to be moving anywhere soon. Keep your legs crossed, it's your own fault.
9) Swap seats during the dessert course: Quick, after you've finally managed to sneak out to the toilet, return and sit down at a completely different table. Leave all the boring sods behind and go sit with the fun crowd, the ones who've been laughing and whooping and knocking back the wine all evening. Go on, be brave and sit down next to the really attractive one, the one you've been eyeing up from afar all year. If this was a proper Office Christmas Party you'd be taking advantage of their drunkenness and snogging them in the stationery cupboard by now, but for now a mild "accidental" grope of their leg will have to do. Until the same time next December.
10) Don't stay for coffee: Make your excuses and leave. Whatever you do don't hang around until the waitress starts clearing away the coffee cups and staring pointedly at her watch. It'll be at this point that somebody will suggest retiring to a nearby pub for the rest of the evening, and only the boring friendless geeks with no social life will take up the offer, and then you'll end up waking in the morning somewhere in the suburbs with a ghastly hangover and your head resting on a colleague's naked chest. Don't let that be you. Go home alone, and come to work semi-sober tomorrow to discover which two other workmates made the dreadful post-pub shagging error. Office Christmas Meals, don't you just love them?
How to survive the Office Christmas Meal
