Office Christmas Party...

Finding Stephenie Meyer's New Moon was next to impossible. In all the bookstores in the eight malls I went to, it was always sold out. Fortunately, I found a good alternative in Powerbooks in Festival Mall and that's what I gave to Charisse (my 'baby' in my office's exchange gift program).

The last minute Christmas shopping caused me to get to work notoriously late. But I was nevertheless still able to put in 4 hours of work. Most of the latter was spent assisting Federico and Aethen with DNN and IIS.

My sister rode with me because she had a nearby get together with her co-TOSP alumni in Tiendesita's so I had someone to talk to while negotiating heavy traffic.

The party was supposed to start at 6 PM but being stubborn workaholics, most of us stayed in our terminals until 8 PM. Actually, Flong, Dexter, Rod and the maintenance guys were almost forcing us out of our seats at 8 so we had no choice.

First thing was the "Ang Pao" packets. The tiny red envelopes contained money and a colored dot. I got a huge sum of money (20 pesos) and an orange colored dot that I had to stick to my shirt. Dexter said that I'm in the orange team.

Because Federico and Erwin failed to buy exchange gifts and because my sister needed a pair of flip flops to walk comfortably to Tiendesita's (she was wearing uncomfortable heels), the three of us ran to SM Pasig.

I bought two pairs of slippers, one for my sister and one for my girlfriend and Federico and Erwin both bought shirts. We ran back and made it (with lots of time to spare).

First game I was able to participate in was the pinaka game. Pinaka translates roughly to the analytical morpheme 'most' in English but some of the words it forms translate into the inflectional morpheme '-est.' If I lost you there, that means you're normal. The next paragraph should clear things up.

Flong, the master of comedy ceremonies, picked up small sheets of paper in a box that contain an adjective and a noun and would read the adjective off of it (temporarily keeping the noun a secret). Each team would then pick a representative that best fits the adjective. Only after all the representatives have been picked would he read the noun. Mark got the prize for the 'fittest forehead' (pinakamatikas na noo), Abramson for 'longest eyebrow' (pinakamahabang kilay), Joel A for being the 'fattest lips' (pinakamatabang labi) and the list goes on.

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Aethen and I left the party momentarily to accompany my sister to Tiendesita's. There, we got to see Karen Nomorosa (who had just arrived from the states), Genesis and Riza. Karen looked radiant. We didn't stay long as we still had a party in WP so after exchanging pleasantries , we walked back to the office.

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I was shocked to learn that Joel J won the beer drinking contest, besting all the other drunkards in the office. Most of us never see Joel J drink but he apparently has a huge tolerance for alcohol. :D

The last game played was charades. We had to guess the name of the Filipino or English Christmas song being acted out by either Flong, Mark or Dexter. The orange team (my team) got quite a few points but not enough to bring us up from last place.

Every team got an "Ang Pao" packet with cash inside. Since there were only 5 of us in the orange team, we each got 100 PhP (500 PhP split 5 ways), which is coincidentally the same amount that each member of the team one place ahead of us got because even though they got a little bit more money, they had more members.

There were left over "Ang Pao" packets from the beginning because some of my office mates didn't attend, so it was raffled off with a twist: Henrik picks a number (which maps to our employee number) and that guy gets a packet and gets to pick the next number. I fortunately got called and my packet contained a fifty so my total take home prize money is the exorbitantly large sum of 170.00 PhP

After the games came the gifts. Turns out it was Dennis L who picked my name from the box and from him I got a new 4 GB USB flash drive. This means I've got a new place to stash my downloaded eBooks and software applications. :)

Before the party officially ended, the administration staff distributed company shirts. So I now have a WP shirt. :D

I drove to LPC at around 12 AM with Flong riding shotgun. After dropping off Flong, I went to Laiya in BF at around 1 AM where another Christmas Party was still in session but that's another story... ;)