My Christmas do is this Thursday and I'm looking forward to it, but the build up has been a DISASTER and muggins here who tried to organise has footed all of the fallout.
It fell to me to organise it so to keep it simple and no thrills, I said let's just reserve an area in the pub on the High Street. Spoke to the manager there, paid £60 to reserve three tables, and started sending emails out to gauge numbers.
Then our marketing team, rather late in the day, suddenly announced they would do a vote. Did we want an all-office party "somewhere in London?" Or stick with organising our department do's as we'd always done previously. The vote went to doing an all-office affair, albeit with a Brexit style 52/48 split.
Not wanting to upset the pub, I sent a message explaining what had happened and said keep the area, keep the deposit, and whoever turns up turns up. At the time I was sort of up for it because I thought the usual sociable crowd would go and we'd have a good time even if it was just ~8 of us. The pub wasn't putting on anything special or closing to the public or anything like that so I just thought, who cares?
BUT THEN they announced our office was CLOSING FOR GOOD. (We already knew this, but "end of the year" was brought forward to "end of November". So now I had an area reserved for a bunch of people to come to "unofficial" Christmas drinks they would have to make a special journey for. I also ended up not being able to make it.
So last night I'm in the queue to see Santa and the manager keeps ringing me. I sent a message explaining where I was, but as I suspected, zero of us turned up, so I got a bit of a (unprofessional imo) mouthful off of her saying she was disappointed and she'd staffed for us attending. I think she was just trying to guilt me. It's a smallish place, it's Friday night, so she probably had two staff on instead of one, and she kept my £60 anyway!
The fact is that none of his is MY FAULT and organising any sort of Christmas party is such a thankless task.