A Tough Day in the Office - On a Catamaran

Question of the day: How do you eat a lamb chop without a knife and fork while on the deck of a boat talking to your company’s Vice President?

This was one of the corporate etiquette lessons I was forced to learn the hard way yesterday. Guess what I did? I went on a catamaran cruise in the harbor for the whole afternoon with some fancy pants company big wigs! It was a Treasury department outing that our VP had for us. It was basically like ten directors, the VP, and me. Well, a few more low rankers like me from my department were there. Every now and then the company throws down a few grand under the pretense of a “team building event” for us all to gather together, get off work, and get wasted on a boat.

Little did I realize taking a relaxing boat trip in the afternoon meant that the morning had to be spent running around the office trying to get a full day of work into four hours. It was madness. We ran into each other, papers would go flying, emails were being sent like mad and fingers were flying over keyboards… I hardly even noticed the cookie smell this morning. What happened to this being a non-stressful event? At about 11:30 my four co-workers and I realized everyone else had left and that the boat was scheduled to depart in like 15 minutes. And we were all still standing in the hall outside my boss’s office. Crap! A sign was quickly made by my mom co-worker (who has major mom tendencies and I have to draw the line at letting her help me blow my nose) to put outside our department that said we were out for the day. (I wanted to include a line that said “Haha! Suckers! Look for us out your window sailing around the harbor!” but it didn’t go over well…) Mom co-worker even included our boss’s cell phone number on the sign for “emergencies”. I’m sorry, in what kind of emergency would someone actually have the guts to call our boss for? And if someone did call, would we pull over the boat for him? Would he take a kayak back to shore if something happened? I can safely say no one on that boat was going anywhere work related once we were aboard. We could have seen our whole building blow up in the distance and we would have laughed heartily and asked the VP to pass the crab legs.

So we screech up to the curb of the dock in my boss’s mini van and all run for the boat for some relaxation. Oh wait, am I supposed to breathe now? OK, finally, deep breath. Work is done.

We’re greeted at the dock by an oddly international cabin crew and are given an overview of the boat, including an orange rope at the front of the boat that we weren’t supposed to cross, which I spent the rest of the trip standing in front of.

The boat was a catamaran that held 30 people. There was only about half that, so they made up for by filling the boat with food and beer. Mom co-worker immediately pulled out her camera and started taking pictures. This went on for the full four hour trip. In fact, I don’t think I ever saw her face the whole time because there was always a camera in front of it. She took pictures of birds, of other boats, of the cabin crew, of the sky, of the ground when she tripped (it wasn’t me), and occasionally the odd photo of me with my hair blowing in front of my face that will inevitably end up on the company bulletin board.

Lunch was served mid-trip and we all sat eating fancy food while listening to Bob Marley play over the boat’s fancy speakers. The best part was that they served a salad while we were at sea. If you’ve never been on a boat before (philistine!), it gets incredibly windy out on deck. Girls hairdos are whipped around by the wind so much you rarely see faces, you just see hair. So props to whatever strange crewmember decided to serve loose leaf salad. I found myself during this course of the meal sitting on a chair on the deck next to the VP. I luckily had missed the salad course and had gone straight for the lamp chops. Thus enters my lamp-chop-eating dilemma. But little did I realize the VP was having his own personal struggle with his salad. I began eating my lamp chop using my hands and trying not to look like a cave man. Then I noticed that every time the VP looked away from his salad plate, a stream of lettuce would blow off it and end up all over his Ralph Lauren sweater. Or it would end up flying over the edge completely and would be floating in the ocean. This went on for quiet some time until the whole deck was basically covered with lettuce. But no one’s going to say anything, since it was VP lettuce. It’s like the pink elephant in the room that you can’t mention because, well, it’s the VP! So we just peeled lettuce leaves off our shoes politely for a few hours. I don’t think he actually ate any of the salad, but eventually looked down at his plate and assumed he was done.

We were supposed to do some kind of team building events. One game was that we would have to write down three interesting facts about ourselves and put them in a hat and someone would read them and everyone would guess who it was. You were supposed to put things like “I have six toes on my left foot.” Or “I had two helpings of dessert today.” But most people put lame things like “I’ve never been out of the country.” Or “My favorite food is pudding.”
I thought I could have fun with this and considered writing “I put a bomb on this boat.” Or “I don’t really work with you guys.” Just to freak everyone out. Then I could act all appalled, because I’m good at that, and I could be like “Who in the world would put such a thing? Mine was the one about how I once had a gerbil named Winkles!”

The VP came back around to talk to me after the meal and games were over and we had all happily moved onto the beer course. He’d apparently heard I just bought a place in downtown and was intrigued. He asked what it’s like living in downtown and I said it was great and that I could walk everywhere. He looked a little confused. He was like “Yeah I guess there are a lot of restaurants in downtown. Is that where you go, out to restaurants?” I suppose I could have admitted what I really do in downtown. I, in fact, have hardly ever eaten at one of the restaurants in downtown. I could have told the VP about how many nights I’ve been drunk and disorderly in downtown, or which bar has the stiffest long island, or where you should go if you don’t want to pay a cover after 10, or how short of a skirt you need to wear to get into places free. But I chose to just nod along. “Yeah, I mostly go to restaurants.”

The bad CD’s eventually ran out and so did the beer. Around four o’clock the boat finally drifted back into the harbor and we all got off, decidedly pinker then when we got on. As I got off the boat and watched the VP drive off in his limo, I realized this had been the most muted and relaxed work event I’d been to. There was no hard liquor, no hook-ups, no drunken scenes. No one ended up throwing up, although I came close – note to self: never eat fifteen proscuitto wrapped shrimp skewers in a row while the boat is making a 180 degree turn in choppy waters. I had definitely now met the “real” work people, not just the young, crazy ones that I usually hang out with. This was what corporate life was supposed to be like: classy and well-catered. I could get used to this. Now, which bar did my friends they would be at for happy hour again?