This weekend I had to attend an infamous "staff night out". I wouldn't have minded but it wasn't even with my colleagues, it was with the special needs team from next door. One of them, whom I've nicknamed Vlad the Impaler due to his enthusiastic use of the stapler, had spotted the iceberg and was abandoning ship so, as is tradition, a bender was organised. I don't know how I managed to get myself invited but I guess a few chats with him in the kitchen about how the microwave stinks of fish constitutes a relationship.
Now I've had my mind made up about the special needs team ever since one of them got their tie stuck in the fax machine last year so the idea of spending a night in their company seemed foolhardy at best. But I was willing to push all preconceived notions to one side (with the help of my good friends Jack and Gordon) and just be all care free and shit. Yes, the evening would be a success and I would build bridges with this notorious gaggle of work shy bastards.
We met at 7 and most of them were already more drunk than I could hope to get in an entire weekend. The evening started to look gloomy. They explained how they manage to charge most of their stationary orders to our account; I laughed politely. They told me how they always use our teams milk, sugar and teabags because they forget to buy their own and find it hilarious when I blow my top about our vanishing supplies; I smiled weakly. The evening started to cry into it's beer. They told me how they were three months behind on producing their new booklets for school admissions, which impacts on my job in ways I don't dare imagine; I stared at them blankly. The evening contemplated taking a suicidal leap from Beachy Head.
Then Rohyponol Ray showed up.
Rohyponol Ray is one of their senior managers who makes my all-time top ten list of 'men who make my skin crawl like a maggot orgy'. He looks like a second hand cars salesman who sawdusts the mileage, not someone with a social care degree. I've heard him say the following things (fortunately not to me):
"I want to worship your body."
"She's protecting that small boy. It's despicable."
"These aspergers kids aren't meeting my targets. Tell them to get their act together."
"It's not my problem if you live next door to a paedophile, love."
"I wish Jeffrey Archer would get back into politics. At least he was honest about lying."
He entered the pub like one might enter an ITV quiz show and proclaimed he was here to "get traumatised", but first he had to chat up the "pod-pod ding-dong" behind the bar. The evening slit it's wrists and overdosed on paracetamol. The coroner was called.
