Check This S*** Out

Sorry about the obscenity there, but I just can't help it! For real. Check this s*** out:

So every year, Tom Douglas (my boss) throws a managers-only Christmas party at his house. Last year's party was cancelled due to snow, so it was rescheduled for last week. I brought along my friend Carrie...



...to eat some good food and gawk at what a rich celebrity chef's house looks like. We schmoozed for a little while, drank some pop out of a lowball glass, and admired his impressive cookbook collection. Then Tom announced that there was going to be a competition.

Carrie's ears perked up.

Downstairs we would find a pile of pipe cleaners and plastic beads. Whoever made the coolest hat out of those two materials would win a trip to Chicago, luxury hotel accommodations, and dinner for two at Tom's favorite restaurant, Avec.

"That's cool," I thought to myself. It never really crossed my mind to compete. There were too many people there, and I wasn't feeling particularly creative. Carrie, however, was a shark and that Chicago trip was a bleeding sea lion in distress. "We're winning this," she said, and dragged me to where the pipe cleaners were. She came up with a brilliant plan: We'd make a crab, holding onto a cake, taking the L train to Wrigley Field. Crab, because Tom is famous for his crab cakes, and the cake, because I do cakes. It works on two levels, you see.

Anyway, for the next hour, we talked some major trash. At one point, Carrie was even heard to say, "Back up off of those pipe cleaners. They're for the winners," and, "If we don't win, we're pushing over the mini-bar and lighting it on fire." It was all in good fun, I assure you.

So we finished the hat, and although it wasn't the prettiest hat in the room (there were some amazing hats there that night) conceptually speaking, it was kick-ass. We all lined up and each of us got 10 seconds to model our hats and explain our design to the panel of judges.

I CAN'T HOLD IT IN ANY LONGER! WE TOTALLY WON!!! Can you believe it? We won a freaking trip to Chicago! How awesome is that? I gotta get us tickets to Oprah because with our luck, we'll show up on Oprah's Favorite Things Day. Maybe we'll drive home from Chicago in our shiny new Jaguars.

We kind of feel like shmucks, though, because now we look like some seriously ruthless competitors. You can trash talk all you want, as long as you lose in the end. Then it's all fun and games. But if you trash talk and then win? You look all kinds of arrogant. I feel bad about that moment when I squeezed past a co-worker and said, "Excuse me, I've got to go win a trip to Chicago," as Tom was announcing the results. That doesn't sound so good, in retrospect.