Mandatory Fun

To make everything perfectly clear, I'm not really a party/gathering person. Crowds of people I don't really know tend to make me clam up, and stand off by myself. The one exception to this is gaming. When I'm gaming, I'm not really me, so it doesn't matter how I act, what I do, or what I say.

Fast foward to today. My boss gives me crap periodically about not going to department parties. To be fair, I've gone to all the ones I could, and the rest I have real excuses why I didn't go. Today though, she tells me that the accounting christmas thingie is "Mandatory Fun"

MANDATORY FUN? What the hell is that? I was probably going to go anyways, just because there was free food and such, but making it "mandatory" just made it torture. Most of the accounting people are ok. However, there's 5 or 6 who have designated themselves "Fun Police" for you Broken Lizard fans out there. Just hearing their shrill voices sets me on edge. So now I get to go stand in a huge crowd of people in a probably 10x30 space, fight some 600 pound woman for a cookie and a juice squeeze, and then stand in the corner away from everyone until I can escape, rather than getting something done, like supporting our users on the system like I'm paid to!

Afterwards, I explained to my boss my dislike of crowds, and she seemed to understand, which helps greatly. Maybe I won't have to do this again.

Yeah right.