Could be Considered Career Suicide

Tuesday evening, The Company had its monthly hoo-rah meeting at its Midtown office. The obvious subjects were touched, with an expected longer-than-usual piece about the state of the economy.

After the meeting, folks stuck around to meet and greet, as consultants tend to do to broaden their network. I was approached by a Chinese fellow, seemingly in his late thirties or forties, with a leather jacket and diamond earrings. He introduced himself to me as my assigned career manager, whom I've exchanged e-mails with but had not yet met in person.

The introduction was brief; we told each other who we were, and he quickly invited me out for a drink.

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I met with my career manager at an open deck bar a few blocks away from where the meeting was. We were joined by two other consultants, one of whom was a new team lead that recently joined my department at The Client.

The guys drank together routinely, and they wasted no time, splitting up immediately to open a tab, claim a table, and wax a shuffleboard table simultaneously.

Our first match teamed my career manager and myself against the other two. In a game of first-to-twenty-one, we blew out the opposing team by a hair. And as my career manager began openly taunting, I too joined in the jeering.

About an hour into the night, we were joined by the local unit bigwig. This is the guy that signs all the checks and makes all the decisions. I knew he was a boozebucket, but had never seen him outside of a formal environment.

He wasted even less time than the others and had a bucket on the table before I realized he had ever arrived. And before he even played a match, he was jawing at how terrible and amateur our shots were.

As the night got later and I got less sober, our taunting got cruder and my shots got lousier. Between the five of us, we drank probably as many buckets.

At the end of the night, the bigwig tried to have a somber discussion with me, welcoming me to The Company and emphasizing how much we needed to keep our customers happy. But he was sloshed out of his mind and kept stumbling and staggering about, and the rest of us had a tough time taking him seriously.

It was well past two in the morning before we called it a night. The new team lead said to me, "If you see me staggering in tomorrow, you'll know why."

And I replied, "I'll stagger in with you. And we'll both think the other is walking straight."

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Next morning, I dragged myself into the office, head hung low, bloodshot eyes, and sat at my desk with a 32 oz. bottle of Gatorade. I peeped over, and the new team lead was wide-eyed and perky, carrying on business as normal.