A Friday Night Out

The middle of February marked my seventh month at my current workplace.

While I'm very good at remembering faces and associating people with my memories of events, I've really been lousy with names. That is why, until now, I don't know what to call everyone in the office. Good thing that I can always say “boss” or “sir/ma'am”. But there are, of course, people at work whose names are already etched in my brain because I've been interacting with them since I started.

Friday night, I got to go out with some them for the first time.

Technically, it was Saturday morning since we left the office way past midnight. I didn't know where we were headed; Max just said it was a place called Central, somewhere near Buendia. I didn't know what sort of place Central was going to be. I didn't know what we'd be having to eat or to drink. I just went because it was the first time that I was invited by the guys to a night out.

A couple of co-workers and I planned to go out for some videoke the previous week, actually, but I wasn't able to come to work on Thursday and Friday because I was down with a flu. It turns out, the plan pushed through anyway and a lot of them went. I missed out.

I didn't want to miss out a second time.

Anyway. Central turned out to be a glorified eatery that served cocktails. We ordered a set that had three large pitchers of booze (I don't know what was in it) and a platter of nachos, sausages, fries, squid, and chicken. And we spent around three hours trying to make conversation as outdated dance music mixes blared over the house speakers. I honestly don't get places like that: grilles trying to be pubs trying to be clubs.

The company was great, though.

Robert, Erwin, Jayce, and Vanessa seemed to like talking about relationship problems. I couldn't really hear them because they were at the far side of our table. Max, Clarence, and I went to talk about books and other geeky stuff, particularly different writers' styles and voices. Clarence suggested a couple of authors and I might just check them out if I don't forget about them.

Max smokes. When he had to go out to the smoker's area outside, Clarence and I went with him as our ears also needed a break. And as a former smoker, all I can say is interesting things do happen at smoking areas. LOL. It's no big deal but it'll just have to be between us three.

But yeah, the people I work with are interesting. It's so nice that we can go out and talk about things other than the latest IT buzzwords or programming paradigms. And I'm really relieved that none of them seems to have found their way here yet. Got to love a good irony, eh?

We ended our night at a Jollibee close to four-thirty. I don't think any of us were drunk but we were buzzed enough to find so many things to laugh about as we munched on pancakes and Chickenjoy. Poor Vanessa. She'd been the punchline of most of the jokes in those four and a half hours. It's great that she's a very good sport.

Well, a lot of people were good sports Friday night— especially that girl at the other table who... ah, Clarence will kill me if I say more.