Coming out of retirement with the grace and style of an Elvis kung fu demo (if you’re confused ignore what follows and search, then return) with another guest contribution. All true – I was there. Enjoy!
A long time ago in the mid-noughties, alcohol was the boozy lifeblood of the advertising and media industry. If LinkedIn had been a thing in 2006, downing pints and draining vodka luges would have been highly sought-after skills.
At the company I was working for at the time, each floor of the office had a large, continuously well-stocked fridge full of premium-strength lager. This was free to all staff, courtesy of one of our clients.
These fridges rapidly became the stuff of dreams, as the lager was soon accompanied by products from other clients, namely chocolate bars and pasties. Party time!
Unfortunately, some of the more refined employees were a bit upset by the lager-centric nature of these fridges. “What if I don’t drink lager? It’s so unfair!” was an actual real complaint from a member of staff during a company Q&A.
If that was the Q, the A from company management was simple, and astonishingly tolerant. In addition to free lager, chocolate and pasties, free white wine was also made available in the now-bulging Fridges of Wonder, to accommodate the beer bigots.
Side note – this didn’t stop the complaints, as a few people protested that they preferred red wine rather than white, and felt they were still being penalised for their palates. In short, some of the more precious employees in the company were confusing perks with entitlements, and their place of work with a Slug & Lettuce.
Anyway, these increasingly stuffed fridges were opened at 5.30pm every day, with a similar impact to releasing the Kraken. Members of staff would often get royally pissed-up in the office, with a predictable trifecta of consequences:
- Theft
- Damage
- Intra-agency shagging
If sofas could talk…
Now I know what you’re thinking.
“If people are off the clock, they should be allowed to drink/steal/break/shag as they please. It’s a free country.”
While I agree with your logic, this assumes company boozing was confined to the post 5.30pm slot. The reality was a bit different.
The TV buyers in the agency – mostly loud angry Essex blokes called Chris – were at the vanguard of the day-drinking movement, and typically bypassed anything as banal as ‘food’ of a lunchtime. Instead, they preferred decamping to a local pub for a liquid diet of many pints of Foster’s (Monday to Wednesday), ramping up to Stella by Thursday/Friday, before returning to the office to shout abuse at ITV.
Unsurprisingly, these liquid lunches sometimes led to poor decisions, like the time when a group of lads (and I do mean LADS) hit the pub especially hard, to build up a bit of lager-based courage for their turn as that year’s Helicockters. Read ‘You’d Better Watch Out’ for context, and keep in mind that, astonishingly, the Helicockters were not a one-time-only gig.
Jason was a workmate of mine, a proud member of the troupe that year, and he had quite the afternoon.
After getting heroically pissed in the space of 45 minutes at a local hostelry, he returned to the office to undertake his solemn duties as a sworn Helicockter. Jason’s beer-powered gyrations clearly impressed one of the secretaries in attendance, and he proceeded to make a new friend.
Those poor sofas.
Riding high on a cocktail of post-coital endorphins and several pints of Belgium’s finest, he decided that it was the perfect time to confront his boss and tender his resignation.
Jason’s boss was a fairly taciturn man called Dave. Dave was one of those rare agency folk who had characteristics like ‘integrity’ and ‘honesty’. He was also quite an intense fellow, with a reputation for taking his job very seriously, and he expected his team to be as focused and hard-working as he was. He was definitely not a man to be trifled with.
Bearing in mind that Jason had left his team a man down, during an exceptionally busy pre-Xmas period, to get shitfaced and swing his cock around in front of a load of secretaries, he might as well have opened a trifle factory next to the office.
Undaunted by his boss’ fearsome reputation, Jason arrived on the floor with a bang, stumbling towards Dave’s desk while shouting that he ‘wanted a word’. He’d clearly made his mind up about his glittering future career path, possibly as a part-time lager taster and full-time ladies’ man. While this was going on, in an office, in the middle of a normal working day, a few of the people on the floor attempted to halt Jason’s progress, to no effect.
The Stella had made him confident and strong. They don’t tell you that in the adverts, do they?
Strong would also be an apt way to describe Jason’s resignation outfit. Technically there was no dress code at the company, but even so, I’m sure he was breaching an unspoken regulation or two based on the fact he was wearing nothing but his underpants, a vest, and for reasons unknown to this day, a pair of aviator sunglasses.
All the while, Dave was understandably seething. He refused to look up at the ensuing spectacle, and merely growled ‘not now’, while getting on with his (and Jason’s) work.
Jason/The King Of The World, by this point looming over Dave’s desk, pulled his aviators down to the bridge of his nose for full dramatic eye contact effect, and uttered four simple words:
‘Dave – I’m not happy.’
It just so happened that made two of them. Dave looked up, and to his eternal credit, resisted the urge to physically attack Jason. He simply and firmly instructed Jason to go home, adding that he would ‘deal with the issue tomorrow’.
Jason wobbled out of the office to enjoy what I can only assume was a sub-optimal night’s sleep. His demeanour was noticeably different the following morning. Sheepish is the word. I think he even put a tie on, which may have contributed to him somehow salvaging his job. That, and the begging.
Jason now lives in Australia, which has two professional benefits:
1 – a vest/pants/aviators ensemble is considered appropriate work attire.
2 – he’s a very long way away from Dave.
Diaries Of Media 