Keep your bum off the photocopier this Christmas

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 22/12/2005 (7267 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

EVERY December, newspapers trot out “experts” on good and bad workplace behaviour to tell readers how to avoid committing career suicide at an office party. First rule: Drink no more booze than your Aunt May’s annual thimbleful of sweet sherry. Thus, you will stand for three hours, cold sober and under the fishy eyes of your bosses, while trying to make small talk with the folks with whom, all day every day, you spend most of the year.

No fun? Well, you must remember this: The “holiday season party” — calling it a “Christmas party,” of course, might leave your company open to charges of discrimination — is really a make-you-or-break-you business event. It’s a test even more dangerous than the annual performance review.

If you’re a man, and you become, ahem, tipsy, you could just tell your boss exactly how he’s mismanaging the company; murmur in his wife’s ear that you’d love to spend a dirty weekend with her in Miami; denounce your workmates as numbskulls; throw a punch at a burly, short-tempered office rival who happens to be an undefeated amateur boxer; or be observed sneaking out to your car with two boiled lobsters and six bottles of bubbly.

If you’re a woman, and you take one shooter too many, you might just say to your male boss, “I think I love you,” or, “Why didn’t you give me that promotion, you (expletive deleted)!” Or, worse, you could awaken the next morning wondering how many of your colleagues took photos of your red-hot performance as a tabletop dancer.

Peter Post, great-grandson of etiquette queen Emily Post and author of Essential Manners for Men, advises women never to attend an office party while looking like they’re auditioning for Sex and the City. As a website in Wales warns, “Mix a short skirt with a couple of short drinks, and your lap dancing will be remembered for years to come.”

For the booze-confused of both sexes, mistletoe is a potential booby trap.

“People have this mistaken idea that it’s OK to be an idiot,” Post says, “and to allow themselves to have one too many drinks, and come on to a guy or girl they might have been attracted to a little bit. And they do it in a vulgar way and act ridiculous… Even if the attraction is mutual, the company Christmas party is not the place to act on it. You may not remember that sloppy French kiss in front of the punch bowl tomorrow, but everyone else will.”

As the party gets louder, the photocopier awaits its turn to induce the sozzled to make absolute fools of themselves. All year, in the little room it shares with a coffee machine, Timbits, sink, and kitchen cupboards, the photocopier looks as innocent as a babe in a manger. On this fateful night, however, it transmogrifies itself into a seductive tool of the very devil himself.

Certain workers of both sexes succumb to an overpowering urge to remove their underwear, plant their naked buttocks on the glass plate of the photocopier, and then poke the start button. Is this a perversion so rare it’s scarcely worth mentioning? Alas, no. Newspapers call it “the classic backside-copying prank, a popular mainstay of the office party” and, like hanging stockings from the mantelpiece, a “Christmas tradition.”

In the United Kingdom, 32 per cent of Canon photocopier repairmen claim that, in the season to be jolly, they’ve been called out to replace the glass plates that ever-wider British bottoms have broken. In response to the annual crisis, Canon increased by 20 per cent the thickness of the glass on its newest photocopier models.

About office Christmas parties, the Trades Union Congress in Britain warns, “If you end up making ‘cheeky’ photocopies, you won’t be exposed to toner or harmful light long enough to hurt you, but you may well spend the rest of the evening face down in casualty, having shards of glass removed from your bottom.

“An even more horrifying possibility is that, in the New Year, you’ll report to work, and find on the notice board near the water cooler, a photo of your very own flabby bottom.”

And so I’m offering this simple phrase to kids from one to 92: Although it’s been said many times, many ways — don’t put your bare bum on the office photocopying machine.

Harry Bruce is an

editor with the Issues Network