Holiday Party at a Ping Pong Bar
Dec. 3rd, 2023 08:26 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
canyonwalkerSaturday night this weekend Hawk and I went to a company holiday party. It was her company's holiday party. My company doesn't really do holiday parties. The one time in the past several years we had an actual holiday party it was small and charming... until a few days later when the company canceled all the $25 Amazon gift cards they'd handed us as door prizes because it was "too expensive". I would have been fine with the modest party if door prizes weren't handed out to everyone, but to hand them out and then claw them back was conspicuously stingy. Though I guess someone in finance being a Scrooge is on-brand for Christmas. 🤣
Anyway, the thing is Hawk's employer, though it's smaller than mine in size and revenue and is cheap in some other respects, puts on better holiday parties. This year's party was at a ping pong bar in San Francisco. Yes, you read that right: a ping pong bar. It's got a dozen or so ping pong tables. And it's a bar in that it serves a full variety of alcohol as well as some food.
We were both sketch on attending. Hawk can't do activities like playing ping pong because the repetitive motions and bouncing aggravate her back pain. She also doesn't drink alcohol (she's allergic) which puts a big crimp in the whole eat-drink-and-be-merry equation. I enjoy these things myself but I wouldn't ask Hawk to do them for my fun. And either way, downtown San Francisco, where the club is located, is a long haul for us just to put in an appearance. But she felt obligated to attend as she's a member of management.
The club party went better than we anticipated. Plenty of other people were not playing ping pong, or were only dabbling at it while preferring to sit down and socialize. I played for 10-15 minutes or so, just enough to have fund doing it while reminding myself that, yeah, it's been over 10 years since I last played.
One of the gimmicks at the ping pong club was a vintage bath tub filled with ping pong balls. Yes, it's literally there for people to "bathe" in ping pong balls and post pictures to social media. All the younger, attractive women in the club who did it got lots of attention with people gathering around to take pictures and video and generally just cheer them on. I decided to take a bath in the tub and got to enjoy 10 minutes of total solitude there. Barely anyone even looked my way. 🤣
We called it a night a bit before 7pm. Yes, that's, like, senior citizen-early. Partly it's that the party started before 5pm. So by 7 we'd had plenty of food, done a bit of socializing, and I'd downed enough drinks for us to feel like we got our money's worth of the company's money. 😅 Oh, and it's also the darn early sunset in the winter. At 7pm it can feel late at night already!
Anyway, the thing is Hawk's employer, though it's smaller than mine in size and revenue and is cheap in some other respects, puts on better holiday parties. This year's party was at a ping pong bar in San Francisco. Yes, you read that right: a ping pong bar. It's got a dozen or so ping pong tables. And it's a bar in that it serves a full variety of alcohol as well as some food.
We were both sketch on attending. Hawk can't do activities like playing ping pong because the repetitive motions and bouncing aggravate her back pain. She also doesn't drink alcohol (she's allergic) which puts a big crimp in the whole eat-drink-and-be-merry equation. I enjoy these things myself but I wouldn't ask Hawk to do them for my fun. And either way, downtown San Francisco, where the club is located, is a long haul for us just to put in an appearance. But she felt obligated to attend as she's a member of management.The club party went better than we anticipated. Plenty of other people were not playing ping pong, or were only dabbling at it while preferring to sit down and socialize. I played for 10-15 minutes or so, just enough to have fund doing it while reminding myself that, yeah, it's been over 10 years since I last played.
One of the gimmicks at the ping pong club was a vintage bath tub filled with ping pong balls. Yes, it's literally there for people to "bathe" in ping pong balls and post pictures to social media. All the younger, attractive women in the club who did it got lots of attention with people gathering around to take pictures and video and generally just cheer them on. I decided to take a bath in the tub and got to enjoy 10 minutes of total solitude there. Barely anyone even looked my way. 🤣
We called it a night a bit before 7pm. Yes, that's, like, senior citizen-early. Partly it's that the party started before 5pm. So by 7 we'd had plenty of food, done a bit of socializing, and I'd downed enough drinks for us to feel like we got our money's worth of the company's money. 😅 Oh, and it's also the darn early sunset in the winter. At 7pm it can feel late at night already!
