Many, many years ago…

The phone rings and I shift my 7 months pregnant bulk over to pick it up.  The voice on the other end of the phone is immediately recognizable as the editor in chief of one of the top IT weeklies.  He also writes the gossip column for the back of the magazine.  “So…” he starts in, “I hear there were naked women at the holiday party last night.”

I start to laugh before I can stop myself.  We were a pretty quiet company.  Scandal didn’t come easily, if at all. My oh-so-prego self had missed the previous evening’s soiree and had been sound asleep at home, where most of my co-workers were that morning, simply because they HAD been out late partying.  To be blunt,  I had no idea what had happened at the holiday party and there wasn’t anyone nearby I could quickly ask.  Still – which of my friends in PR had put him up to this joke. It had to be a joke, right?

“Um, we don’t do scandal.”

“It’s December – who is going to get naked? They’d be frostbitten.”

He wasn’t in the mood for kidding around.  I stopped laughing, sheepishly promised I would call him back and started dialing my co-workers at the headquarters.  No one was picking up.  Weird.  Finally get through to the HR director who hems and haws a bit.  Turns out there were no naked people but heck, there was a memo.

“A memo?  Why is there a memo about something that didn’t happen?”

The long and short of it is that the party had a casino night theme and the employee entertainment committee had hired entertainment.  They were thinking tasteful top hat and cane routine, and hadn’t bothered to watch the ENTIRE video performance provided to them by the troop of entertainers.  Gulp.  I’m meanwhile wondering how I am going to explain this one.

•    No, no one was completely naked.

•    Yes, there was a memo to employees in case anyone was offended.  (And, obviously some people were; tassels are not exactly family entertainment.)

•    No, I wasn’t there and I don’t know exactly what happened.

And people wondered why I had high blood pressure during my pregnancy…and probably before my pregnancy.