Accidents will happen

Tonight was the company staff party and for unclear reasons, I'd volunteered to help organise it, and then the organisers had volunteered me to be the MC for the evening.

This was one of those tough venues where you're about six inches above the floor and the audience is dispersed in a wide arc around the walls of the venue, rather than pressed together in a scrum like I prefer. I tried a few bits of material but with a crowd like that it isn't very useful; what they wanted were big, broad bits, and so when I got on to my impossibly hard corporate trivia quiz things picked up.

Well, that and my constant cajoling for everyone to have another drink probably helped.

It's important to make big physical movements and repeat yourself. The guy running the sound desk was a great help too; the bar has a band every night and I assume once you've done the lights for a bar band fighting two hundred drunks for a year or two, lights and sound for a corporate party can't be much of a challenge.

It's important to make big physical movements and repeat yourself. Just checking everyone's paying attention.

In three hours we moulded the office into a mob of cheerful drunks (amazing what a birthday cake and the sight of five people being forced to eat durian will do), and then bundled everyone who was still upright into taxis, and headed over to the Marina Bay Sands where they crammed us into a small patch of the bar on the 57th floor, and plied us with more booze. I'd been avoiding alcohol while I was doing my onstage duties, but accidentally made up for it once the shots starting coming.

I cleared off late, as the party was winding down, and rematerialised back home with no memory of the journey. Booze is a wonderful time saver sometimes, but not to be used every day. For example, it's a terrible way to liven up the journey to work.