Holiday parties at the office have a tendency to bring out the nincompoop in a lot of us - but do your workplace fete disasters match these?
Ah, the office Christmas party. That wonderful time of year when coworkers come together to celebrate hard work and camaraderie...only, it’s also often around the same time that you realise you don’t really know any of your colleagues very well - and that, combined with an open bar and a karaoke machine, can make for one awkward night.
So, to make you feel a little better about any past (or future) shockers, we’ve compiled the best collection of head-shaking office party stories the internet has to offer. Don’t be shy in sharing your own Christmas bash disasters in the comment box below either, because we can all use a little mental holiday from the holidays…
1. “I work at a nonprofit agency for the blind, and a large percentage of our staff is blind. At the last holiday party at my office the upper management hired a DJ and told him to come up with some ice breaker games. The only ice-breaker this DJ could come up with was a game where the players had to keep toilet paper rolls in between their legs, and another player had to use a toilet plunger to try to spear the rolls from between the other persons legs.
What this amounted to was that we had a bunch of blind people thrusting a wooden plunger at each other’s crotches. It did not end well.”
2. “My former boss got drunk, sat me down at the bar and said that he was giving me a raise to [less money than he was currently paying me]. Whoops!”
3. ”Only five people of 30 showed up (including myself). We proceeded to drink too much and subsequently discussed in great detail who of our coworkers we would cage fight in the office.”
4. ”One year a girl, who had been divorced for about two or three years, effectively came out of the closet at the company Christmas party by inviting her girlfriend. We were all surprised, understandably, but it wasn't a big deal until the girlfriend got drunk and started picking fights with the employees. Our co-worker had to drag her girlfriend out of the party as she continued to raise hell. That was a fun night.”
5. “The entertainment consisted of the head of the company showing us his vacation slides…and then he sang a song about a bear. The slides were beautiful, but just reinforced the difference between the haves and have-nots. And it got old after the second carousel.”
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6. The party was like a frat house run amok. The director drank too much and threw up shrimp cocktail on the white shag carpet. The plant manager got into a screaming fight with his wife in the driveway. The chemist was found making out with the loading dock supervisor, who was about 30 years her senior and, more importantly, not her husband. And I accidentally walked in on the sales director peeing in the unlocked hallway bathroom (which I thought was the coat closet; we were both surprised). The president himself got completely hammered and went around telling people totally inappropriate stories, gave me a giant bear hug that lasted a little too long, and broke the sliding door to his patio.”
*This list was compiled with the help of the Fast Track blog and Mental Floss