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I unapologetically skipped every single work party, happy hour, whatever. I don’t owe those people a second of my time that I’m not being paid for.
That’s a chad move from you, but doesn’t your boss/manager notice that ? I know corporate culture sucks so badly precisely because they want to create some “artificial family”, not matter how creepy/corrupted it is by capitalism. Substracting oneself from that is always hard, so I’m curious to know how to manage to do it.
Alas, poor Jorick!
My office is not much of a faux-family hellhole, luckily, and most of my colleagues are way older than me and have families of their own. But even still, I’m always very private about my personal life around my coworkers. I laid the groundwork for this well before the pandemic, which obviously helped. But if I got invited to stuff I’d either say, “maybe, I haven’t decided yet, I’ll have to see how I’m feeling,” (like if it was far in the future) or just very plainly, “I’m sorry, I can’t today/tomorrow.” No one has ever asked me “why not?”, but if you just say something vague like “I have other plans” then most people will take the hint. I try to ask my manager how the event went afterwards, just to show polite interest and not let it become a weird awkward thing we don’t talk about.
It probably helps that, when it comes to work stuff, I am wide open and make myself available and useful to my teammates and my coworkers in general. So I perform well and am open to engagement while at work, but that’s it. None of my managers have never made a big deal of it.
I’ve never worked a job that had a company christmas party. Though I’ve been to union ones and they’re a lot of fun. What are company ones like? My only experience with them is through media like The Office.
Well it depends on the company and the people organizing it. There’s usually some official part where the boss or whoever talks about how much money the company made and other statistics using powerpoint, trying to make it fun / festive at the same time. They praise everyone for their hard work etc. Then they try to lighten the mood by embarrassing themselves a little. Putting on a silly costume or singing or something equally weird. Usually dinner and maybe some drinks are paid for. There might be some sort of group activity to entertain everyone. If you like your coworkers you go to a bar afterwards (or whatever you wanna do lol). Its possible to have a good time if you have friends in your coworkers, and some companys do more than others of course. But imo it always feels a bit… forced. And all the parts that could be fun don’t really exist when its done online so yea. I mostly watched old people do weird jokes and other old people not understanding said jokes.
My partner’s company is doing an online holiday party.
They even hired a catering company to deliver meals to everyone
It’s quite possibly the single most deranged thing I can imagine, but I am getting a plate of ribs out of the deal so just call me Johnny Deranged
How tf do you have an online party even?
Lmao yes I plan on napping during the Christmas zoom call on Friday
