The Old School Christmas Party

There was a naïve joy in drinking too much free, or at least subsidised whisky and telling your colleagues exactly what you thought of them throughout the year, be that good or bad. You could dance badly to those awful Christmas records from the seventies and eighties which the re-release every single year, fall down, skin your knees and throw up out of a taxi window on the way home.

But those days are over. It used to be that by the time you actually remembered what you had done at the works do it was February and the bitter sting of regret had dissipated like some sort of alcohol induced sleeping therapy. And what brought these halcyon days to an abrupt end?

The Camera Phone and Facebook.

When your indiscretions couldn’t be discussed until the first week of January there was a week of exposure to the family to deal with. The memory faded and the impotent rage of spending ten days locked in a house with your immediate relatives forced all reverie of the party into a corner of your mind.

Today you’re expected to be Facebook Friends with everyone you work with, even if you don’t actually know who the hell they are. Who’s Pete Davis? He likes all your links and comments on your pictures of your dog chasing a Frisbee but you can’t quite place his face. You wrack your mind and finally uncover that he did work experience in the post room three years ago. You just never quite got around to removing him.

So, there you are at the party and the room has divided, not along the boy girl lines of elementary school but into tribes of “Those Who Do” and “Those Who Film Other People Doing.” It seems like a fun idea, catching the fun for posterity but in fact it ruins the atmosphere. Remember when we were told to ‘throw your hands in the air, and wave them like you just don’t care?’ Received wisdom tells us we should dance like no-one’s watching but that’s impossible while half your workforce is standing around the dancefloor, their joyless faces illuminated in the blue digitized glow of images of other people trying to have fun.

And then it all pitches up on Facebook. You’re tagged doing shots with the guy with the wandering hands, arguing volubly with that heifer from three desks over about her personal hygiene and that sound she makes when she eats at her desk. All of the very worst moments of your year compressed into one dazzling night of craptitude and it’s all captured on the cloud by people who never join in in the first place.

In the olden golden days before Facebook all you had to do was strong it out. Apologise where you had to, keep your head up and wait for people to forget all about the very worst excesses of your boozed up behaviour. Now it’s there forever, evidence for the world, your real friends and family to see for years and years to come. One day you’ll be sitting reminiscing with your grandchildren looking at all your old photos and you’ll find yourself saying “Look, that’s granny when she was young and pretty! Ah, I could barely stand, my tights are ripped to shreds and if you look closely, my boss is trying to cop a feel!”

Thanks Facebook. Thanks for everything!

@dancash is a features writer living by the sea. This article was supposed to be about fixed asset tracking and inventory management but I had to get it off my chest!

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