Taking Stock of Last Night

Last night our department attended an end of financial year dinner and drinks thing. Before anyone asks what is this cool job and what is this cool company, please let me say it is not all that cool. We work our asses off (well, sometimes) and they’re definitely not paying us as much as they should, so the least they can do is give us a fucking dinner and a few drinks once in a while.

Venue: Picture a glass-fronted room on the banks of a quiet lake. The lights are bright enough for you to get a good view of beautiful Albert Park (this is where the Australian Formula 1 race happens every year) but dim enough to not be intrusive. There is a tall spiral tower that you can climb for lack of better things to do but I didn’t waste my energy on such pursuits. And the black swans in the lake are fairly friendly until they start fighting amongst themselves. Anyway, here’s a picture so you don’t have to think too hard about how it might look.



The only non-blurred one in this photo is my back!!



Food: Absolutely brilliant! This restaurant is one of those “Modern Australian” cuisine places and such cuisine is always really suspect, to me at least. Most times when I dine at one of those places (which is not often because as I already mentioned, I think the food is rather suspect), at least three words in the description of the meal will be unfamiliar to me and I just cross my fingers and hope I get something edible (I am a super fussy eater so I don’t leave much room for what “edible” can be)!! Anyway, this meal turned out to be quite normal and not all that “modern”. True, the calamari entrée was rather small but the folks who got the potato gnocchi seemed to enjoy it. And with the mains, the menu said Roast Porterhouse with pommes purees and root veg jus and it turned out to be just good ol’ steak and mash and some rather bitter tasting sauce which I totally avoided – I assumed that was the root veg jus part which literally translates to root vegetable juice I think! Of course the chocolate silk tart was just a tad too rich considering I was drinking alcohol. If I had just smoked a big fat joint though, the chocolate silk tart experience would have been almost orgasmic!

Alcohol: It was a beer and wine thing because that’s all the budget would allow. Here’s where we had some major dramas. There was this one table that was being slightly rowdy and drinking too fast and the maitre d just decided to stop serving them alcohol until they had some more food in their system. This did not sit very well with them and they just got rowdier than before. However, their glasses were topped up during the main course and this placated them somewhat. At dessert time, one of them specifically requested the sticky date pudding over the chocolate silk tart and as this was an alternate serving thing, each table gets half of each choice and either you eat what you get or try and swap with someone else. So he didn’t get the sticky date pudding and didn’t try and swap with anyone and this totally pissed one of the other guys off. He got up and started talking really loudly about the restaurant staff and how this was like a Nazi camp and hello, hadn’t they heard that the Holocaust was over. We tried to calm him down although we were all laughing too hard because he was being really funny and obnoxious at the same time. My biggest worry was he was going to jump up on the table like he has done at our neighbourhood beer garden on a previous occasion but he refrained.

Anyway, I had about four glasses of wine but it didn’t do a thing to me. I was just kinda floating along and also that chocolate silk tart messed up my drinking ability big time.

Drugs: I got home and forced S to smoke with me even though I knew it was just going to make the whole chocolate tart + white wine melting pot much much worse! I can tell you I had a time falling asleep. My stomach kept making strange noises and kept threatening to send me running to the loo and the joint ensured I couldn’t lay my head down for a while because of all the spinning that happened when I did!

This Morning: Eyes all sore, head still spinning, stomach growling, limbs extra lazy. God, I’m getting old – thank goodness its time for lunch!!