You know, I’m starting to cultivate a very bad reputation at work. Not necessarily ‘bad’, more like ‘nefarious’. The happy hour that we had last Thursday was a pretty good success. Aside from hiking 1.3 miles in the summer sun dressed in monkey suits, RFD turned out to be a pretty good place to hang out and booze it up.

We left at 4pm. By the end of the night it was closer to 11pm. Ugh. A couple of scotches and a few beers later and I had to cut myself off so that I could drive home. After dragging my sorry butt into the door, I smooched my wife and got ready for bed. I woke up at 3, did some work, talked to some people, woke up the dogs to go out for our morning walk, got ready for work and BAM! Sitting at my desk before 8am.

Which left some people a little bewildered as to how I still looked fresh and showed no ill effects from the previous evening’s festivities. Hence, the nicknames ‘Party Boy’ and ‘Iron Man’. And there was even more to come that day. I still had another happy hour to go to.

Now, let me preface the next happy hour with an omen that I saw on my way into work that Friday. I’m tooling along, driving behind this SUV, just as happy as a clam. I’m maintaining my distance, doing everything right and lo and behold it happens: I squirrel darts out from the side of the road. Almost as if it was in slow motion I saw it run into/under the rear wheel of the SUV in front of me. It made me spit out some of the Pepsi I was drinking. Poor little guy never saw it coming.

I am Iron Man, indeed. I about squealed like a 4 year old little girl.

The happy hour at Lucky Strike was pretty cool. There were a lot of people that I hadn’t seen for a while as well as a lot of people that I hadn’t met. Dear, Lord, it was insane. The bartender, Moe, was pretty generous with the scotch. Then he started passing out Heineken bottle opener/key chains to the ladies. I protested saying that it was sexism. I then said ‘If you give me one, I’ll put it on my Prince Albert’. And he gave me one. Too bad I don’t have a Prince Albert. I have a cool key chain, though 😉

The highlight of the night has to be almost getting into a fight in the men’s room. With one of my friends, no less. He had way too much to drink and started banging his head against a framed picture while he was taking a leak, all the while screaming ‘Why? Why not me?’ because another friend of ours had no interest in him and was dating someone else. Two security guys were in there telling him to stop and were preparing to escort him out.

What’s a guy like me to do? I’m the one that brought him in there to separate him from the young woman and her boyfriend. I’ll tell you what…grab him by the neck, remind him to zip up and drag him out the door. The security guys helped me escort him out as he kept screaming and flailing.

Why me? Thank God he didn’t pee on me or leave his bodily parts flouncing about.

Talk about a buzz kill. I wound up spending 15 minutes outside yelling at him to calm down and to relax, all the while people are milling about in china Town. Go figure, it almost came to blows again when he said he was going to go back in and fight the security guys because they’re racist. Yeah. Racist. One was black, the other one was white.

Eventually everything calmed down and our good friend David took him home. As I headed back up to Lucky Strike I kept running into the security guards who thanked me for diffusing the situation. Yeah. No problem. I love that kind of stuff. /sarcasm.