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drinking amongst salespeople
Friday, August 6 1999
One of the big advantages to listening to music on my headphones is that I feel less ashamed of certain unusual music habits that I have. For example, when I'm at home with Kim playing music on the stereo, I would never think of listening to the same song over and over again. It would be a definite "DJ faux pas" and I'm sure Kim wouldn't let me live it down. But here in my quiet isolated half-assed office cubicle, I think nothing of, for example, listening to Liz Phair's "Polyester Bride" on one-song repeat. It's just a perfect little sad soundtrack for my optimism of despair.
As the hour for the long, tiring motivational ritual known as "Energy" approached, I did my best to wrap up my work in such a way that I could pick up later and continue where I was leaving off. The last thing I wanted to hear was the loud gym-teacherly voice of Karin the over-involved membersupport girl calling us together to give the precious energy that few of us have. I slipped out of the building and rendezvoused with some colleagues at Chevy's, a big Mexican restaurant near Gordon Biersch in Mission Valley. Unusually, these particular colleagues were not from the engineering or product resource, but from the "revenue" (or "sales") resource instead. My invitation to this particular rendezvous was a direct result of my having moved out into the main area, where I bump into sales people all day long.
For a long time at Chevy's, it was just me and two not-especially-familiar members of the sales staff. We spent an unusually small amount of our time griping about conditions at work. I think this was because the big sales push is now over, and not wanting to bore the others with discussions about technical things, I was allowing them to dominate the conversation. We did all agree, however, that the never-ending ritual called "Energy" is something best avoided. Besides, drinking margaritas seemed plenty energizing to us.
But boy those margaritas were big, so much so that Mike the sales guy was joking about being able to sit in the glass and dangle his feet over the edge. When I was done with my first, it seemed natural to have another, as the others were doing. In the end, I only had two, but it was enough for a serious tequila buzz and even a bit of a hangover for tomorrow. Remember folks, I'm not a light weight. These sales people drink like fish!
Before too long, the vast bulk of sales had joined us, along with some others more familiar to me from "product" and "engineering." Al, who, like many of my colleagues, has been putting in insane hours of late, wasn't really in much of a festive mood. He stayed for about a half hour and left complaining about stomach pains caused, he thought, by the strong drinks.
I'd given Kim a call, and eventually she showed up. But even though she got to see old friends like Kevin and Sherms and even meet some interesting new people, her heart wasn't really into this scene at all. She insinuated that she felt alienated. After awhile we left.
I was tired, weak and drunk as we headed to Point Loma to get a couple flicks. Kim was harrassing me, as usual for these situations, about my failure to pay any attention to her. Somehow this fight escalated out of almost nothing into a huge ordeal. By the time we came home, we were far too much at war to even watch Leaving Las Vegas. Before we went to bed, things were so bad that I was saying I couldn't take it any more and suggesting that I wanted to break up. Kim's fighting style is so relentless that the only way out seems at the time to be suicide. If I were to flee, you see, she'd surely catch up with me eventually.
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