OFFICE-PARTY RULES

The same principles apply, in intensified form, to office parties (I’m using this, as most people do, as a generic

term, covering all parties given by a firm or company for its employees, whether white- or blue-collar) –

particularly the annual Christmas party, an established ritual, now invariably associated with ‘drunken debauchery’

and various other forms of misbehaviour. I have done a couple of studies on this, as part of SIRC’s wider research

on social and cultural aspects of drinking, and I always know when the run-up to Christmas has officially started,

as this is when I start getting phone calls from journalists asking ‘Why do people always misbehave at the office

Christmas party? ’ The answer is that we misbehave because misbehaviour is what office Christmas parties are all

about: misbehaviour is written in to the unwritten rules governing these events; misbehaviour is expected, it is

customary.

By ‘misbehaviour’, however, I do not mean anything particularly depraved or wicked – just a higher degree of

disinhibition than is normally permitted among the English. In my SIRC surveys, 90 per cent of respondents

admitted to some form of ‘misbehaviour’ at office Christmas parties, but simple over-indulgence was the most

common ‘sin’, with nearly 70 per cent confessing to eating and drinking too much. We also found that flirting,

‘snogging’, telling rude jokes and ‘making a fool of yourself’ are standard features of the office Christmas party.

Among the under-thirties, 50 per cent see the office Christmas party as a prime flirting and ‘snogging’

opportunity, and nearly 60 per cent confessed to making fools of themselves. Thirty- and forty-somethings were

only slightly more restrained, with 40 per cent making fools of themselves at Christmas parties, often by ‘saying

things they would never normally say’. Although this festive ‘blabbing’ can sometimes cause embarrassment, it

can also have positive effects: 37 per cent had made friends with a former enemy or rival, or ‘made up’ after a

quarrel, at a Christmas party, and 13 per cent had plucked up the courage to tell someone they fancied them.

But even the most outlandish office-party misbehaviours tend to be more silly than sinful. In my more casual

interviews with English workers, when I asked general questions about ‘what people get up to at the office

Christmas party’, my informants often mentioned the custom of photocopying one’s bottom (or sometimes

breasts) on the office photocopier. I’m not sure how often this actually occurs, but the fact that it has become

one of the national standing jokes about office parties gives you an idea of how these events are regarded, the

expectations and unwritten rules involved – and how the English behave under conditions of ‘cultural remission’.

I will have much more to say about different kinds of ‘cultural remission’, ‘legitimized deviance’ and ‘time-out

behaviour’ in later chapters, but we should remind ourselves here that these are not just fancy academic ways of

saying ‘letting your hair down’. They do not mean letting rip and doing exactly as you please, but refer quite

specifically to temporary, conventionalized deviations from convention, in which only certain rules may be broken,

and then only in certain, rule-governed ways.

English workers like to talk about their annual office parties as though they were wild Roman orgies, but this is

largely titillation or wishful thinking. The reality, for most of us, is that our debauchery consists mainly of eating

and drinking rather too much; singing and dancing in a more flamboyant manner than we are accustomed to;

wearing skirts cut a bit too high and tops cut a bit too low; indulging in a little flirtation and maybe an illicit kiss

or fumble; speaking to our colleagues with rather less restraint than usual, and to our bosses with rather less

deference – and perhaps, if we are feeling really wanton and dissolute, photocopying our bottoms.

There are exceptions and minor variations, but these are the permitted limits in most English companies. Some

young English workers learn these rules ‘the hard way’, by overstepping the invisible boundaries, going that little

bit too far, and finding that their antics are frowned upon and their careers suffer as a result. But most of us

instinctively obey the rules, including the one that allows a significant degree of exaggeration in our accounts of

what happened at the office Christmas party.