As you may have imagined, our call for your sordid tales of holiday party mishaps yielded tales of in-office hookups, puking, and even sexually transmitted diseases. Merry Christmas, indeed! Here are your best/worst war stories:
Be wary of the open bar, via get-nick:
I had a coworker bring his fiancée to our work Christmas party that was being held at an Irish Pub. It’s a small office, so there were only about 20 total employees.
The fiancée decided to drink all she could at the open bar and continued to order shots for everyone. She was a lightweight, and at around midnight she started to get a little frisky with the guy I worked with, right in front of the boss and everyone. After the last shot, she went to get some more tongue time. She stopped the kiss, her eyes got big, and she projectile vomited all over my coworker and the boss’s wife. Out comes a churned blend of nachos, Guinness, Fireball, and copious amounts of Jello shots. The guy dodged just enough to not get the full facial, but it hit his neck, shoulder, and arm—and my boss’s wife’s shoes. She wanted to beat the hell out of her.
We were all stockbrokers, so you can imagine the heartless abuse that he received for the next full year. It really didn’t end until he quit.
Perhaps consider not skinny-dipping. Swift:
Not me personally, but the receptionist at our company (small, private company of about 85 people and their dates) decided after a few too many that it was time to go skinny dipping at the indoor pool in the hotel we had the party at.
She got naked in her room and streaked down the hall and jumped into the pool ... in front of the entire company and their dates.
SHE STILL WORKS HERE! The owner, who is awesome, was a great guy about it and just said, “I’ve done much worse than that when I was her age and drunk.”
This is bad. deuces:
I had been dating this girl for about two years and knew it was going south, but i did not want to end it around the holidays because i’m such a great guy (mistake). Unfortunately i met a new girl about three weeks before Christmas, and since i had every intention of breaking up with my current girlfriend who was in college a few hours away (important detail), i decided it would be safe to bring my new girlfriend to family Christmas. I broke the news to my family a few days before Christmas that i had broken up with my longterm girlfriend and i would be bringing a new girl to Christmas for dinner. I think we all know where this is going.
My old girlfriend, who was not coming in for Christmas, decides to show up and surprise me. You can’t imagine how it feels to have your longtime girlfriend who your family thinks you are no longer with show up to your parents house while your new girlfriend is there getting to know the family. Needless to say, the new girl broke up with me, the old one made an amazingly awesome scene, and my two older brothers had the biggest laugh of their life. that was 13 years ago, and they still bring it up every year. Even my wife, who I didn’t even know back then, gives me shit about it now. brutal.
You may guess how this one from Dante3000 goes:
My own office holiday parties are pretty unremarkable, but I worked for a Museum that was used for a lot of upscale holiday parties for big tech companies. I worked in event coordinating and would help arrange venue rentals and coordinate logistics. Part of this was working with part time and contract staff to help cover (as we needed more staff for events than just regular day to day operations).
For one holiday party we hired a former employee to serve as the front desk/receptionist for the event. This role pretty much meant they served as a point of contact for the client. Anything the client needed (clean up, extra lighting etc.), they knew they could go to the front desk and they could radio out to the rest of the staff to handle it.
Anyway, I help get everything set, vendors in place. Greet the client and then head out before the party begins (they’d been setting up since about 7am, so I’m already about 12 hours on the clock). The minute I get home, I get a call from the facilities staff saying they need me back at the Museum. Apparently, someone on catering had been feeding our receptionist cocktails and she had gotten quite drunk and belligerent. She wouldn’t listen to other staff, saying I was the boss and if she was to leave, I could tell her.
I drive back to the Museum and begin to negotiate to try and get a VERY drunk woman out. Initially, she denies being drunk. Then she can’t stop apologizing and then she starts crying (all at the front desk, in the middle of this party). I take her into one of our prep areas and continue trying to get her to leave, calling a cab and everything. She keeps bawling and then says she wants to apologize to the client and won’t leave until she can.
Once the cab arrives, I just take her by the arm and tell her it’s time to go. I walk her out of the building and as we’re headed to the cab, she begins screaming about how this is bullshit and if anyone was uncomfortable with her behavior they should just tell her and not hide. I get her in the cab and give the driver my credit card info and tell him to take her wherever home is (I don’t know where she lived and she wouldn’t tell me).
The client came up to me afterwards and actually apologized to me, because I had just spent the last hour negotiating with this woman to get her to leave. It was the most understanding I’ve ever seen from a client. Also, because we no longer had a front desk person, I had to stay until we locked up (around 2 a.m. or so).
Epilogue:
About a week later there’s a $65 charge on my credit card for the taxi. I tell my supervisor, who responds, “Did we pay her for that night?” “Not yet.” “Good, consider that her severance.”
Will Rr’s wife is clearly a saint:
Wasn’t a holiday party, but it was good.
My wife is head of HR/Operations for a startup in San Francisco. She managed their move into a new office, and hosted the big office warming party. Probably 250 employees/friends/etc in attendance.
I was 5 cocktails in when I started playing beer pong. That was mistake #1. Mistake #2 was that my buddy and I kept winning, so people kept challenging us.
Eventually I just up and wandered away from the table, but it was too late. After 10 minutes horizontal on a couch, I needed to get to the bathroom immediately. Unfortunately for me, it was a brand new office and a bit of a labyrinth. I was 5 feet from the bathroom door when I first vomited. The floor was carpeted.
Word spread quickly. After more vomiting in the urinal, my wife found me. She wisely decided it was time to go.
We live in the east bay, so that meant it was a necessity to catch the last BART train of the night. No cab was going to take us, with vomit covering the front of my shirt.
As my wife tells it, the 10 minute walk to BART took longer than 10 minutes. It felt rushed to me but maybe that’s because I kept stopping to vomit in trash cans.
The final train back to the east bay was PACKED, but it didn’t take long for people to clear out a space around me. One look/smell and they reflexively moved away.
It became immediately apparent that standing was not an option. Fortunately for me, everyone was moving as far away from me as possible, so I sat down, cross-legged, on the carpeted floor of the train.
It was then that I realized I was wearing my favorite pair of jeans. They were several years old, incredibly comfortable, and in reasonably good shape aside from the pretty large hole in the crotch. I sat there, hunched over, vomit on the front of my shirt, rhythmically spitting up into a very visible hole in the crotch of my pants.
“Is he ok?” voices nearby asked my wife? “He’ll be fine,” she said.
After arriving at our BART station, I rambled quickly down the stairs to throw up in the giant paper recycling bin. “Why didn’t you throw up in the trash can next to it?” my wife asked. In hindsight, it was a good point.
We took the escalator down to the street. The 15 minute walk to our house might have taken me an hour, so my wife hailed a cab. “Is he going to throw up in my cab? If he does, that’s a $100 cleaning fee.” My wife jumped in the cab, leaving me horizontal of a bus stop bench.
A few minutes, or 15 minutes, or an hour later, my wife returned in our car. I stuck my head out the window on the drive home; the breeze was wonderful.
We pulled up to the curb outside our apartment. I fell out of the car, lying down in the dirt patch between the curb and the sidewalk. It felt like the cool side of the pillow, the most refreshing pillow I had ever encountered. I begged my wife to let me sleep there. “You’re not sleeping in the dirt outside our apartment,” she cruelly declared.
The following day, I kept close proximity to the couch. For some reason I was craving Destiny’s Child and Beyonce, so I put that on instead of TV. Beyonce nursed me back to health, while my wife headed back to the city, to deep clean the vomit infused carpet at her newly christened office.
And finally, an unexpected Christmas gift. YourTeamSucks:
My wife and I took over hosting the holiday party after the previous hosts moved away. We usually have some kind of theme, either dress-up or dress-down, whatever we feel like putting out there. Anyway, when my wife gets drunk she likes to play matchmaker with the single people at our parties. As we get older, we have fewer and fewer single friends, but last year we had quite a few because some of her work friends got into the mix, and a lot of them are a few years younger than her and still looking for love. There was one bachelor at our party that year, a coworker of mine, and my wife was DETERMINED to hook him up with one of HER single coworkers. The booze was flowing heavily, and everyone was having a great time. As she hoped, the guy and girl clicked, flirted and drank all night, and ended up taking a cab back to the girl’s place when the party was over. A few days later, the female coworker sheepishly approaches my wife, and asks if she can have my phone number. When asked why, the girl responded that she needed my phone number, to contact me, to contact the dude she slept with (my coworker), because she had contracted gonorrhea from him. My wife has now sworn off trying to hook people up when she’s drunk.