corproate america

badly taken shot by me in our hotel room

so friday night this past weekend was spent doing what we were supposed to have gone to san diego for: ryan's company celebration of him reaching his goal. it's called the "100% club".

allow me to preface this with a quick little background: i never played on a sports team in my life. it is quite possible that i am not a "team player". ryan, on the other hand, played team sports his whole life. he actually has a team mentality and a belief in the good of a team.

so, ryan is a member of corporate america. he does sales. they're split into teams, have team building exercises (like the flight of the conchords song), grow their facial hair out together and fish. altogether, it is manly and motivating.

so ryan makes it in to the ever elusive 100% club and is treated to a weekend in san diego. part of the weekend is a friday night cocktail hour and dinner. ryan's parents came down with us and took ava (poor them, the child hadn't slept and was glass-eyed and border-line hysterical when we handed her over) so we could join ryan's fellow team members for a night of (as ryan's boss likes to put it) "gallivanting".

i can't tell you how much fun gallivanting is to a pair of sobers in a room full of drunks. especially when one of them thinks this grown up sales team stuff is silly and is 7 1/2 months pregnant (guess which one i'm referring to). so we sit there, hand off our drinking tickets, hand off our gambling money and lean backwards when one man in particular talks to us with so much beer on his breath that my hair begins to move away all by itself. he also slurred his words together. ryan says he always talks like that. i find that very hard to believe.

in my attempt to have a good time i pick one of the spouse's to talk to. he's not interested. when i ask him what he does for a living he almost refuses to answer.

"it's really hard to explain." he says, "i don't really know how to say it."

when i ask him if he's in the mob, he finds a way to explain and you know what? wasn't really that hard. he must have thought i was really stupid or something. or he has a heightened sense of career (benefit of the doubt to him, i choose the second).

later, i found out that not all wives attend. i think i gave ryan quite the stink eye. next time, i don't think i'll go unless ryan begs me and tells me he won't have any fun if i'm not there (he probably wouldn't).