Corporate Super Happy Fun Trip

So. Wednesday night was one of my co-worker’s birthdays. To celebrate, she, I, and another girlfriend from work decided to go out for happy hour—the celebratory choice for pink-collar wage slaves the world over.

Of course, happy hour is generally conceived of as a cocktail party of limited duration, consisting of a few composed cocktails and a snacky, to be followed by a wholesome dinner in the privacy and comfort of one’s own home. The guy who joined us for a bit followed that basic outline, returning home before dark like a good little soldier. The women, though, starved for intelligent conversation and relationship moral support, not to mention gossip, stayed out for hours. HOURS. As I was leaving I looked down and saw it was 11 p.m. Happy hour had become a long evening spent splashing about in a bottle of tequila.

I went home, where I proceeded to raid my kitchen for anything that didn’t move as fast as I. I could have skeletonized a tofu cow in under 3 minutes, like a school of hippie piranha. Then, instead of using the sense god gave me and going to bed, I wound up in a conversation with a friend of mine about the vagaries of romance in this, our modern world, that went on far into the night.

The next morning, despite my shower before bed, I woke to find that I smelled like a key lime pie that was off-gassing grain alcohol. Ordinarily, going into work under such circumstances would be less than appealing. Yesterday, however, I was scheduled for a company field trip to our corporate headquarters. Three hours coming and going in a car with five co-workers to whom I am not close. With a hangover. Yea.

Having gotten out of bed an hour before my usual time, I did what I could to masquerade as a normal employee with out an incipient drinking problem. I arrived at work and climbed into the mini-van, where I promptly attached my iPod to my head and went to sleep.

We stopped in Litchfield, Illinois for breakfast. Considering the hypoglycemia brought about from the previous evening’s excesses, breakfast was certainly a welcome thought. As we’re climbing out of the mini-van in McDonald’s parking lot, I look across the way and see a group of church kids pouring out of their own van like so many clowns hopping out of a car.

Like clowns, these kids were simultaneously amusing and frightening in almost equal measure. It was clearly one of those sects where all the women wear skirts and most of them don’t cut their hair, instead sculpting it into ridiculous poufs and curls and buns. And the skirts, oh god, the skirts . . . I wish these women would just embrace their decisions to dress like dowdy schoolmarms, instead of bastardizing fashion. Please. I mean it, just swath yourself in yards of calico and call it done.

And, let me just say, Jesus might do a lot of things, but he’s not going to do suntan pantyhose and open-toed slides. If you believe that he loves you, please believe that he wouldn’t want that for you either.

Although I was a bit worried that the church-clown-kids might try to throw a sack over the head of my gay co-worker and hustle him off for re-education, we escaped McDonald’s without incident and continued our drive/nap to corporate headquarters.

The visit itself? It was fine. Whatever. Blah blah blah happy drink the corporate Kool-Aid bullshit. I don’t care. I like my job okay, it is what it is and I’ve certainly worked at far more wretched places. It was neat enough to see the joint, and now I must try to formulate a plan for how I can get them to transfer some of the money the spend on rented plant upkeep to my paycheck.

We get in the van to come home; I promptly go back to sleep because—well because I don’t really want to talk to anyone in the van. Does that make me a bad person? Probably. Fine. I slept.

So, on the way home we stop for dinner at RubyAppleFriday’sGarden. Whatever, it didn’t absolutely suck. It was food. What killed me, though, was how all my co-workers kept going on and on about how good it was.

No. No it isn’t. It doesn’t have enough salt or pepper. It’s not interesting, or special, or anything. I think most of it came out of a bag. It’s just some decorative crap on the wall casual chain shithole, so by definition it can’t be that good. It’s not trying to be. It’s trying to be mediocre enough so that rubes will eat there.

Clearly, the business model is working like a charm.

After dinner, for some stupid reason, I chose not to go back to sleep. I listened to my iPod, looked out the windows. I can’t read in the car, which is sucks, but I listened to Neil Gaiman read “Chivalry” and it was almost better. Everything was fine until my dumb ass decided to turn off my headphones for a minute to see what was going on in the car.

What was going on is that someone had turned the radio on to some worship at the feet of Jesus shit. I don’t want to hear that, ever, much less trapped in a fucking mini van with six co-workers. I was tempted to insist they pull over and let me try to hitchhike back to the Lou. Instead I just listened to Cyndi Lauper sing about masturbation, and tried to forget where I was.

Finally, I arrived safely home. Jason came over. We put on pajamas. We watched The Giant Gila Monster. And all was right with the world.