However, in the murky hinterlands between the two, one can sometimes spot the cross-contaminated hybrid: the work holiday party. We are still a good ten days out from Christmas but I have already run the gauntlet of this year’s work holiday parties and would like to compare and contrast mine with my wife Kringlina’s for illustrative (and entertainment) purposes.
Kringlina’s work holiday party was this past weekend. Just as a quick background refresher, Kringlina is a veterinarian and she works in a practice with a few other vets and a dozen or so support staff. The practice is linked under one name with other locations that have their own doctors and support staffs. So the work holiday party was for all the locations, and not every employee came but everyone who did come brought a guest, so it was probably close to a hundred and fifty people in attendance. The party was held at a country club in a ballroom that probably could have seated 300, which turned out to be the perfect size for dinner tables on one side, a dance floor in the middle, and casino gaming tables on the other side. Cash bar, passed hors d’oeuvres, buffet dinner (pretty good except for some regrettable spinach polenta), buffet dessert (really, ridiculously good, unless that was just the post-cash-bar-munchies kicking in, but bite-sized Rice Krispie Treats plus fondue chocolate? COME ON.) The decorations were festive and reasonably non-tacky (the main motif seemed to be red sparkly cones that were probably meant to evoke Christmas trees but looked like gnome hats, but whatever) and the door prizes were cocoa-and-booze combo sets (Frangelico and peppermint schnapps in the latter role) and all in all a good time seemed to be had by all. It was like a successful wedding reception that happened to be held around the holidays and also incorporated craps, roulette and blackjack (which, by the way, all wedding receptions SHOULD emulate – this seriously needs to catch on, people).
As an outsider who has access via one degree of separation to the vet biz, I really do find it fascinating. I think most veterinarians are pretty down to earth people despite being ridiculously smart and driven. People-doctors share those last two attributes by and large as well, but I’ve known too many doctors who develop massive chips on their shoulders and adversarial attitudes toward their patients. And to be fair, when the patients are walking talking caricatures of welfare queens with disproportionate entitlement issues, or delusional New Agers who would rather be home singing over crystals but have submitted to an exam at the insistence of a loved one, or victims of abuse who won’t leave the abuser or victims of addiction who won’t get help to kick the habit, OK, fine, I understand how one’s view of humanity would dim and possibly, by extension, how one’s self-regard would swell because others’ inferiority feeds one’s innate superiority. That is all hella-depressing, though. Vets, on the other hand, certainly get annoying, entitled, ignorant, hurtful pet owners as clients but at the end of the day the patient is an innocent animal and I think that makes for an entirely different experience of what it means to do the job. To diagnose and treat a patient that does not speak or understand English and is highly likely to expel bodily waste at you out of sheer terror is humbling, and not only does this make me respect vets a lot, it also (I believe) makes them nicer people, either by weeding out the not-so-nice ones in vet school or just forcing some perspective and enlightenment into the heads of the profession’s practitioners.
And lest you think I’m just being gratuitously puerile in mentioning the bodily functions of cats and dogs, it is actually relevant: veterinary medicine is a pretty low-glam gig. Most of the vets I’ve met through my wife are women and they’ve all figured out various ways to attire themselves such that they look professional and trustworthy and yet avoid anything that could be easily ruined by an agitated Cocker Spaniel, as well as anything that would make it difficult to chase a feisty stray Siamese kitten or wrestle a skeptical Great Dane. No high heels, no skirts, no frills. And their technicians and assistants usually just wear scrubs and have done with it. All of which is utterly understandable and appropriate but when you then get a bunch of vet clinic employees together at a wedding or going-away shindig or holiday party or whathaveyou, I swear you can actually feel the thrill in the air that the women exude thanks to being able to express themselves in more girly sartorial choices. That was certainly the case at Kringlina’s party.
(Incidentally, as a last note on the whole yes-this-job-involves-live-scared-animals aspect, at the holiday party they gave out individual awards for each practice, one of which was called the Pet Whisperer, for the employee who had the best way with animals, which actually means something in a business where dealing positively with animals is the whole point. Kringlina won that award, which did not surprise me at all and filled me with pride and left me impressed with her co-workers’ ability to recognize what an asset she is. So, booyah.)
Another thing that always strikes me as borderline through-the-looking-glass is the median employee age at a vet clinic. Where I work, in government contracting, I am consistently one of the youngest people in the office, surrounded by supervisors and federal lifers and so forth all old enough to be my parents. Whereas a vet clinic sometimes seems like Logan’s Run, with a slightly more generous Lastday age of let’s say 40. And the techs, assistants, and receptionists are younger still, and it’s not that unusual for there to be teenagers (18 or 19) on staff. It makes for a different workplace vibe, and also makes for a potentially rowdier holiday party. That was one of the things I really enjoyed about Kringlina’s party, the fact that there seemed to be a little something for everyone: a DJ playing Gwen Stefani for the young’uns to go B-A-N-A-N-A-S to, and Texas Hold’Em dealers for the graying husbands to bitch at for dealing crap hands. Good times.
Kringlina’s been working at her current practice for a little over a year, and we skipped the holiday work party last year because our little bundle of joy was a mere ten-week-old at the time, so this year was our first exposure to the event. We are already looking forward to next year’s.
So, that’s all well and good, and my work holiday party was yesterday. The side-by-side comparison I am about to embark on is, admittedly, completely unfair, because I am all-at-once comparing (a) a party thrown by a multi-location company with a party thrown by a small office (b) a daytime weekday no-spouses party with a Saturday night spouses-welcome party (c) veterinarians to government employees. Of course this is no contest and my party is going to come out looking lame compared to Kringlina’s, because it would in fact look lame in isolation on its own merits. And it’s not like I’m all het up over this or feel somehow wronged; Christmas is not, in fact, ruined. I just think it’s funny, and a little pitiful, and if that is underscored by the fabulosity my wife and I had enjoyed a couple nights before, ah well.
My party was in a room at the top of the office building, with big windows overlooking the Potomac river and Georgetown, which is a sweet view (I may have to sneak up there if we get another heavy snow). The room was decorated in the most secular, non-specific manner possible with a snow theme as follows: white table cloths, dollar store snowmen centerpieces, Styrofoam snowflakes taped to the windows, and curls of silver ribbon taped to the walls. Lest you think the silver ribbon is a cool, creative way of evoking the theme, let me clarify that a single strand of curled ribbon was taped up every five feet or so, like headless balloons, very minimalist. After all that effort was put into selecting the least-denominational decorations possible, they went ahead and set up a small radio in the corner and tuned it to local WASH FM, which plays nothing but Christmas music all December long. The food was a spread from a local Chinese place (which gets no complaints from me; it may be impossible to screw up beef and broccoli but I still enjoy the hell out of it) and an assortment of desserts brought in by co-workers (and this definitely was not cash-bar-influenced munchies, but they were good, too). In addition to the radio, the entertainment such as it was consisted of a bingo game for door prizes (cocoa again, but no booze of course) and a yankee swap which I opted out of, wisely so if I do say so myself.
So yeah, just kind of boring and flat. The most interesting thing about the party, to me, was that in its own way it played out a version of the “different circumstances, different fashions” phenomenon. The party was from 11:30 to 3:00, right in the middle of the workday, so of course everyone there was dressed for work, and this particular government office is a suit-and-tie kind of place (although I generally skip the jacket). I own several Christmas ties, but I didn’t wear one yesterday for three reasons:
- I am running low on dress shirts, haven’t had time to pick up dry cleaning what with the big move sucking up all my time, and I couldn’t put together an outfit where any of the ties would make sense
- I had just worn the best one to Kringlina’s party
- I wasn’t sure if goofy Christmas ties were the rule of the day for the work holiday party or not, since this was my first WHP at this office
As it turned out, the last concern shouldn’t have been, as most of the men in the office did in fact wear Christmas ties. Which is kind of fun, but kind of not really. Maybe some of my co-workers look forward to this time of year for eleven months, when they can set aside their paisley or matched monochromes and bust out the Santa-doing-cartwheels, but at the end of the day (or, more accurately, the wee hours early in the morning) we’re still knotting a silk noose around our collars and heading in to the Big Gray office building. The party was such a perfunctory lo-fi affair that the men in Christmas ties just seemed like putting sprinkles on institutional mashed potatoes. Fun, different from the every day, but … odd. Don’t get me wrong, next year if I’m still working out of this office I will plan ahead better and wear one of my own Christmas ties on the day of the party, because if that’s the way it’s done that’s the way I’ll do it; I am all about fitting in and following the crowd at work.
I know I’ve gone on way too long already about work holiday parties but I can’t abandon the topic without at least mentioning the Christmas episode of The Office which aired last week. I love The Office and I love it when it goes to really dark and awkward and uncomfortable places, such as Michael Scott pretending to be Jesus and heckling Phyllis as Santa, but the stand-out moment of the viewing experience came near the end when the resolution of the Pam-fixing-up-Oscar-with-Warehouse-Matt subplot involved Oscar being brusque and dismissive with Matt in saying goodbye, then looking at Pam and saying “I know what I’m doing.” Because as I was processing that particular exchange Kringlina turned to me and said “That was a neg, right?”
I can’t really come up with a better explanation. While I don’t have a shred of respect for Mystery, I am glad that I live in a world luxuriously goofy enough to include him and his brain-dead Pickup Artist VH1 show, and I love the fact that my wife remembers that show and its absurd secret code-language well enough to remind me of it almost out of nowhere. At the risk of sounding redundant, I am so proud of her.
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