Working holidays

Last Friday the place where I’m getting post-surgical physical therapy was holding its holiday party. They were actually closing the office at 1300 for the potluck and white elephant exchange, so the therapy sessions were running at quite a good clip as we approached the noon hour.

But it got me thinking, as I was being simultaneously iced and electrocuted (okay, undergoing "electrical stimulation" therapy), about Office Parties I Have Known.

Way, way back, during the Reagan Administration, I worked for one of the major aerospace companies in an office at a satellite site. Meaning, an office building on Century Boulevard; not one of the self-contained highly-secured plants. We had one security guard, Fred, at a beat-up old desk as you came off the elevator.

Well, it was the tradition of the folks in that group to have a holiday party the last day before year-end shutdown, including potluck and white elephant exchange. and for the occasion, my boss got a special dispensation from Fred to bring in a bottle of booze to spike the punch.

(The next year, when we moved to the big plant, this was out of the question. Although at that site I simultaneously realized why we had year-end shutdown and wondered why they’d stick at a bit of rum to go in the punch: from about mid-December on, you waded through six-packs of empty beer bottles in the assembly-line workers parking area, which made you think about how many electronic parts weren’t clearing QC. I reckon that we shut down just to save on the reworks.)

(And yes—line workers had to park in a different area from white-collar types. Farther away. Your car had a windshield sticker—either green square or red triangle—depending on your status. Parking in the wrong area had serious consequences.)

That was a great party; people brought in all kinds of food and some of the white elephants had been in the group longer than many employees. It was all quite jolly, and something I’ve not experienced much of since.

At HBO people were way too cool and hip to engage in such frivolity. The managed healthcare company in DC—well, hard to be jolly when everyone’s sitting on pokers.

The telecoms company just had the corporate extravaganzas, in both Northern Virginia and Wales. In all fairness, I’m not sure that the Brits have full grasp of “potluck”—you may have had to have been exposed to Midwestern Methodist gatherings in some way to get it. But that doesn’t explain the dearth on this side of the Pond.

(We did have department-sponsored “morale” events. Lord knows we needed them, not that they worked. Oh—one year the department paid for a dim sum lunch. Nothing says “Merry Christmas” like fried chicken feet and pork buns, let me tell you.)

However, one year I stumbled into the party held by the training group, and that harkened back to my aerospace experience. There was a bottle of bubbly, Christmas crackers (with everyone wearing the paper hats and sharing the corny jokes) and that general air of family geniality.

I’m not at all surprised that there was nothing on either a corporate or department level at the enterprise software company. I always pictured the CEO of the multi-billion megalith echoing Scrooge, calling Christmas “a poor excuse to pick a man’s pocket every 25^th of December”, and this definitely filtered down through the corporate culture.

At the SaaS company, you’d have thought there’d be quite the holiday gathering, but there wasn’t. I mean—there were only about 80 people on site and everyone pretty much knew everyone else, and mostly got along. And we had company-sponsored things like barbecues at other times. But there didn’t seem to be much interest in the hols. Our “official” event, dinner at the Reston Hyatt, was thrown together by the CEO’s admin in a matter of days (and she did a bang-up job of it); but it just speaks to the lack of enthusiasm.

(There was a cube-decorating contest. That’s as close as we got.)

My employer in Seattle—well, they went through the motions. But I never felt there was any warmth in it.

Now—there is one exception to this litany of holiday humbuggery: the small systems integrator where I worked in RTP. My editor and I threw together an evening event—caterer, flowers, must have been booze although I don’t recall it. The location was the apartment clubhouse of one of our tech support guys. Everyone dressed up, including the warehouse workers. One of them brought in a boom box (it was 1992), and we danced to it. Allison and I put together little gift boxes that people received (which included $25 AmEx gift certificates). It was like…Christmas.

Where I am now, they had a potluck on Friday. By 1000 the aroma of fried chicken permeated the entire floor. But of course, when the time came I was in PT. So I don’t know what the actual event was like.