I thought my days of The Drunken Blog were behind me. I thought that since I've graduated from college, since I bought a house, since I got married that the days of drunken debauchery were behind me. I never would have expected those days to come crashing back during a holiday work party.
Every year my company throws a holiday party for the department in which I work. Heavy hors d'oeuvres, wine, beer, and a whole lot of awkward work-based social interactions. What could be more fun? Since my wife was working the night shift that night, there was nothing more fun for me on my agenda, so I attended the party.
I'll start off by saying 9pm is a pretty early time to end a party that involves alcohol, but when it starts at 5 and is open bar, you're doing pretty good. I mean, the reception for my wedding was only an hour longer (please don't get the impression that this work function in any way compared to my wedding, because it didn't).
Of course, I am one to show up fashionably late slash I had work that I had to finish. Luckily the bar was within walking distance of the office. I showed up at about 6pm and helped myself to a beer, since the bartender was apparently taking a break. My conversation went something like this:
Beer one topic: Work related (professional)
Beer two topic: Non-work related
Beer three topic: Work related (casual)
Beer four topic: Work related (trashing coworkers)
Beer five topic: Non-work related (but definitely coworker related)
The flow shouldn't be that surprising to anybody. With your first drink you don't have anything to talk about other than work related stuff. You're still basically in the office except you have a drink in your hand.
By the second drink you've finally figured out something else to talk about - probably the weather or sports.
By the third drink you've run out of non-work related things about which to relate, so you go back to work topics, although this time you're just shooting the breeze as if you were at the water cooler, if your office actually had a water cooler.
By the fourth drink your conversation degrades into talking trash about other coworkers.
By the fifth drink, you're talking about that drunk person at the party.
The fifth drink is where my story really starts. Now, this isn't my fifth drink, mind you, but it is somebody's, and she can't handle her alcohol.
I don't want to give any sort of distinguishing features because I promised her I wouldn't tell anybody about this, but suffice it to say she is very high ranking at the organization for which I work in my company. And she was plastered.
She kept hugging people, slurring her speech, and just generally being a genial drunk person. You know exactly the type of person I'm talking about - she'll yell at everybody to shut up, put up her hand and point, as if she is going to make some profound statement, and then just sort of sputter some gibberish.
I hate leaving parties earlier, so I stayed with some friends from work and kept an eye on this woman. I was really curious about how she would get home. As other people were saying goodbye to her as they were leaving, they also asked how she would get home, and despite the fact that she didn't give a coherent answer, she did give an answer, and that seemed to put them at ease.
After the tab was closed, I continued to hang around because now I was really curious about what was going to happen. There were only five of us left at this point, and we needed to make sure that this woman got home safely. She was at that super dangerous drunk point where she thought she was sober enough to drive, though she couldn't even form a complete sentence.
Some coworkers that had left previously decided they were going to go to Jackson's, a bar within walking distance, and this woman also wanted to go to Jackson's to continue her drinking. The five of us were guiding her away from Jackson's because she clearly didn't need anymore.
Well, that's not entirely true. One of the group, somebody with whom I work closely on a daily basis, as we were trying to sneak her by Jackson's said, "Hey, aren't you going to Jackson's?!" I don't think he has quite honed is social interaction skills yet and I gave him the dirtiest look I could muster, which was probably not very intimidating, so I just gave him a head nod to get the point across. Our group was now down to four.
Luckily, she didn't really understand what was going on and we managed to walk her back to the parking garage where her car was. The sober woman in our group, who is actually a subordinate of the drunk one, was kind enough to offer to drive her home. Drunky lived close by and Sober didn't mind.
How naive we were. Drunky had a huge issue with the fact that one of her subordinates was going to drive her home in such a state and would take no part in it. She wouldn't even show us where her car was until Sober pretended like she left.
After about 30 minutes we managed to find Drunky's car, but Sober got so frustrated that she left - with our blessing. So it was just me and Knight left to get Drunky home. We had another fifteen minute conversation in which Drunky flagged down an elderly man as he was driving away because she thought he was Sober.
I think the problem we had was the fact that we tried to reason with Drunky when she was so obviously beyond that point. After a few more pleas from Drunky to just let her drive herself home, I simply took Drunky's keys from her and gave them to Knight so that he could drive Drunky's car, and I could follow him so I could drive him back to his car.
I ran down in the garage and got my car. The one flaw in our plan was the fact that Drunky didn't know how to get home. Or rather, she could not articulate it to Knight, so we ended up in an apartment complex about 2 miles away from where she actually lived, which is pretty impressive since she only lives 2 miles away from the office.
I managed to get an address from Drunky to plug into my GPS by convincing her that Knight had to urinate something awful. She took pity on him, and after three tries, we got the right address. So this time I lead the way and we eventually made it to her house.
Of course, it wasn't that easy. The last house on the block was a number short of her house number, and around the corner they started a number above her house. We had to use the good old pee trick in order to get her to show us that her house was around back (whoever number those houses had issues).
We didn't bother to make sure she got in bed. You can call us bad guys, but after this hour long ordeal to get Drunky the 2 miles from the bar to her house, and with each of us having a 30 minute drive in front of us to get to our houses, we split.
It's pretty weird seeing somebody in such a position of authority act like a drunk 18 year-old freshman, but the one nice thing about it is that I think I have a few bonus dollars coming my way in the near future.
