BlitzBlog

I left a job in April, from a place that I’d worked at for almost 12 years. In that span of time, the company grew from $40-million to over $200-million, and the personnel went from around 75 to about 250.

The highlight of the year, each year, was the company’s holiday party, and the week leading up to it. That week, usually the first or second in December was when the sales force would gather at headquarters for the
national sales meeting. Admittedly, in the early years of my tenure, there wasn’t much of a force. It was just 4-5 outside sales people, the 4 in-house sales managers, the national sales VP and the 3 brothers who
owned the company.

But as the years went on, the sales force grew, ultimately to over 20 people. With this larger crowd all arriving at HQ on the same day, it always felt like a sort of homecoming or family reunion. I always enjoyed seeing faces from the far-flung reaches of the outside world; I liked getting to know these people with whom I’d had sporadic contact throughout the year; seeing what their business needs were, getting a feel for their sales chops.  I got to be quite friendly with many of the sales people, and count 2 of them, Dave The Blue Frog McCarty and Colonel JT Beefcake Thompson, to this day as my closest friends.

The Holiday Party, each year, was a fancy affair, always held at a nice local restaurant or catering hall. The year of my first party, I’d been at the company about 4 months, and there were maybe 50 people there. But there was sumptuous food, an open bar, and a live band and dancing.  Each subsequent year, the numbers grew, but the quality of the party always kept up.

Since I had a 40-mile-long drive home afterward, I usually left the party relatively early- probably at about 10, or an hour before the official end of the party. But in about year 4 or 5, my friend Tom TDusty Roads Dust came on board, and with his friendship, I began staying until the end of the parties. Soon afterward, Dave joined the company, and Tom and I started joining Dave after the parties for a few nightcaps at the hotel in which the sales folk were staying. At some point, Tom and I started discussing that instead of paying for drinks after a night of drinking for free, and then having to drive home afterward, that perhaps we should rent a suite, and have our own after-party party.

And so 5 years ago, we rented said suite, and discreetly invited a dozen or so of our closest friends from the company to come on up and hang out. At first, we stopped to buy a few sixes of beer and some chips, but as the years progressed, we planned more carefully, and eventually had the whole thing down to rote. We’d buy liquor and beer and mixers and chips-dips-chains-whips, and have the whole spread ready for when people started arriving at around 11pm. The parties grew each year, to about 25 people meandering in and out of the room, until usually at around 3:30am, people started heading back to their own rooms. Tom and I would eventually crash, alternating years on who got the bedroom and who got the pull-out sofa.

Invariably, the following morning we would awake, bleary and hung-over, to a room that looked like the Aftermath at Tornado Alley. I don’ know how 25 people could use 100 plastic  cups (although it always seemed half had been ultimately used as ash trays), especially since most people drank from the beer bottles, which also were strewn about in clusters of 7 or 8. Generally, I couldn’t walk from the couch to the bathroom without some sort of chip or two sticking to my foot, and often there were mystery damp spots on the carpet. The kitchenette area was full of empty beer bottles, cigarette-laden plastic cups, skinned-over creamy dip bowls, and a variety of opened and unopened mixers and liquors bottles. We’d gingerly try to clean up somewhat, trying to keep the tinkling of glass or crinkling of paper from splitting open our aching heads, in an effort to at least make the disaster area manageable for the HAZMAT team. We usually left them an unopened bottle of liquor or two, and a nice tip. I guess this was enough to satisfy the hotel gods, as they keep letting us use the room each subsequent year.

Tom and would try to crawl back to semi-human consciousness at a local diner, stuffing our stomachs with a nice hearty breakfast before heading back to lay on the couch at home to recover in front of our respective unsympathetic families.

So this year, as I stated way back at the top of this entry, I’d left the company in April. Tom preceded me out the door, leaving in February. But about 6 weeks or so ago, we started receiving emails from our friends we left behind, asking if we were planning to have our party, even though we weren’t employees of the company anymore. After some discussion, we said “What the hell,” and committed.

This year was different, in that when our friends started walking through the door, it wasn’t a casual arrival of someone we’d seen 20 minutes before at the official company party. These were our ex-coworker/friends who we hadn’t seen in months. It was a wonderful feeling to receive joyous hugs and to be told, over and over, in various heartfelt fashion, how much we were missed. At the office during the year, at the meetings, professionally and personally Tom, myself and JT (who’d also left over a year ago) all kept hearing how much people really missed us.

For myself, after a very trying year (son in hospital, 2 changes of jobs,) hearing these things over and over was the best present I could’ve gotten this season. It made a great party even more fun, and I can’t wait ’til next year.

Hopefully by then, my head will be a bit more clear.

A while back, when we were living in our first house, my wife went shopping, and somehow wound up in Ethan Allen, where they had a couch that caught her fancy. Now we weren’t in the market for a new couch, as
our furniture was perfectly serviceable and in no need of replacing, so when the lovely missus came home saying she’d seen this “beautiful couch with nice coffee-color leather upholstery,” I was somewhat surprised. I listened to her glowing description of said butt-planter, and when she’d finished, I asked the one question every red-blooded husband would ask.

“How much?”

“It’s on sale (of course) for $1000!” she replied excitedly.

I  answered, “Well, it may on sale for only $1000, but it really costs $60,000.”

“Sixty THOUSAND dollars? What the hell are you talking about?”

“You see honey, the couch itself may only cost $1000, but look in our living room. Grey couch, mauve chairs, black lacquer coffee table, pink-and gray aubusson rug (hey it was the 80s- gimme a break). This  couch- brown leather you say?”

“Yeah, distressed brown leather. Really soft too.”

“We both know that this couch goes with absolutely nothing in our home. So here’s what will happen: The couch gets delivered and we put it in the living room. It looks terrible with everything around it. You
follow?”

“Mmmhmmm…” she replies skeptically.

“So now we start hunting for other items to match the couch. In a month’s time, we now have an entirely new living room. So that $1000 couch has now cost us closer to $5000.”

“Okay, but where’s the other $55,000?”

“Well,” I say, “We now have 2 perfectly good sets of living room furniture. Except in our itty-bitty humble abode, we have no family room or den, so now we start calling contractors to get estimates for that addition we’ve talked about. Long-story-short, we got a new family room, an new set of furniture and a $60,000 hole in our bank account.”

The missus stood there in thought, undoubtedly in awe of my visionary economic acumen. She pursed her lips a bit and said, “Did I mention the leather is reeeally soft…..”