10 Reasons Not To Get Drunk At Your Office Christmas Party

1. You may end up telling your...er...uptight (and pregnant for the second time round) manager: “I did worry about you having a baby...you and your husband were both already so highly strung, I thought becoming parents would send you over the edge!”
2. You could find yourself throwing your arms around the boss at the end of the evening, sobbing “You are the best boss I’ve ever had!”...not quite the great compliment it may seem, when everyone knows you’ve only worked for two companies in your life.
3. You might go around telling everyone that So-and-so (who fortunately is not actually at the office party this year) is "really quite useless and it’s a wonder she has not been fired by now".

4. You may get so drunk already at the pre-dinner drinks that you get a serious case of the munchies, and find yourself ordering a plate of nachos....nachos that get added to the total bar bill (£4,500), incurring a 10% service charge on the whole bill and meaning that those nachos cost your boss an extra £450!
5. You could still be so drunk from those pre-dinner drinks (the lousy nachos did nothing to soak up the alcohol) that you wind up falling asleep at the dinner table with your fork mid air, then later slump face first into your food.
6. You may have sober colleagues with cameras at hand to record you falling face first into your food...colleagues who print copies of those photos and distribute them around the whole office the following day.

7. You might convince yourself that you are The Dancing Queen (or Karaoke King) and subject your colleagues to appalling entertainment all night... colleagues who once again have those cameras to hand, and have also now befriended you on Facebook.
8. You may not notice you're suffering a wardrobe malfunction and be revealing far more of yourself to your colleagues than is quite frankly decent.

9. You could fall out of the party venue, pirouette helplessly on your 9 inch heels, then stumble into the arms of a passing stranger, exclaiming “That darn pavement is very dangerous!” (yes, deceptively flat, isn’t it?)
10. You may well suffer short-term memory loss and never know how on earth you got from London’s Soho district to Charing Cross station one mile away... but next thing you know you are on a train that is miraculously headed homewards (and at least you have the sense to call your husband and ask him to phone you when you're close to your home station, thus ensuring  you are awake to get off that train and don't end up riding to the end of the line)

These are lessons I’ve learnt over the past few years....from watching the drunken debauchery of my colleagues, I hasten to add....OK, OK, I may be guilty of that last one but that was back in the bad old days when I worked for the delightful swearing, shouting obnoxious boss and we were all determined to drink his inflated bank balance dry. Since then, though, I limit my intake to just enough to be sociable, but sober enough to watch the antics unfolding all around me.

How about you...did you think alcohol and office Christmas parties are a good combination?