One Thing Leads to Another

October 11, 2018

Around 3PM, several of us headed offsite to a celebratory work function. Several teams have been working a lot on an internal initiative for the last few months, and this was a way we could collectively celebrate hitting one of our milestones.

We had a small area reserved at Spin. I took this late in the afternoon, after most of the ping pong action had settled down a bit.

Interesting note – there’s a table at Grubhub, and our team sometimes plays a bit after our weekly Sprint planning meetings. Everyone – every single person – is quite good at ping pong. And in fact, I’d argue they’d all be contenders for the Pingmaster trophy.

One unfortunate aspect of having a remote team: not everyone was able to join and celebrate with us. Dave was able to make the trip in from Detroit, which was nice… but Mark works remotely, Steven is in Minneapolis, and Luis is in Ecuador.

Post-event, as we were gathering our things and heading out… someone suggested shots. I can’t recall who, but we were joking about this before leaving. Next thing we know, a few of us are staying behind and saddling up at the bar.

Our bartenders, Roman and Joy. I went to the bathroom before this phase of the evening, and someone decided to cede the decision-making process to these two. So I returned to find a round of Malört waiting for us. I, along with the bartenders, was surprised that no one else in the group had heard of Malört.

I’ve had the good sense to avoid it up until now, but technically my first taste of Malört happened in a basement Ping Pong bar in downtown Chicago. I guess that fits. Note: it was actually much better than I thought, though the aftertaste really comes at you.

Things went downhill from here.

At some point, I was retelling the “Statue of Liberty shot” story, that my friend Kevin tells so well. I’ve got a video of someone telling that story in full, and I really need to track it down and post it up for the ages (such a good story).

There was a round of very strong Rum poured, and as I was talking about things being set on fire, this happened.