I'm still contracting where I was contracting before which means that now I have to deal with one of the best things contractors have to deal with-- Holiday Parties.

On Monday, I get into work to discover that the VP has scheduled the Holiday Party for that morning. At 9. At an ice skating rink. I know, right? So when I get in, those employees who didn't use the party as an excuse to extend their holiday for at least another morning were all standing near my cubicle as my cubicle is in the front row of cubicles in front of a little break area where everyone was gathered for breakfast and to hear the details about ice skating.

Now I didn't want to go. At all. But deciding what to do isn't as easy as it sounds. First up is that everybody around me and everyone in my department, even those who I wouldn't expect to, decided to go, and all made that decision right in front of me. And because there's a great big huge group of people standing in front of me all geeked up on OJ and Costco muffins getting in a holiday spirit, it's hard not to get sucked into the "well, everybody's doing it" vibe. Who wants to look like a loser?

OK, so what the hell, I'll go. Except, technically I can't because I'm a contractor and contractors can't go. To get clarification, I even asked the Creative Director (my boss's boss) and he said no I couldn't. He then also said I should go anyways only to ask on the way there if he'll get me in trouble for allowing me to go. On the one hand, it's a compliment that people who I work with want me to go even though they all know I can't. On the other hand, it's a little awkward when very-higher ups walk by you at the rink and give what to you looks like a "what the hell are they doing here?" look. Oh, and they handed out company tchotcke's to all the employers there and when I walked into the rink, I didn't know whether I should ask for one. The only reason I did was because the Creative Director, again, told me to go for it.

But still, why did I go if I really didn't want to and wasn't allowed to? Was it just one more example of me giving into peer pressure? Or was it because I talked to my boss a few minutes before all this happened and when I mentioned I wasn't going, she off-handedly mentioned that there was going to be nobody around and as she was busy signing time sheets at that particular moment, I wasn't sure she meant that just as a statement of fact or as a subtle way of letting me know that she knows that there's nobody around and if I don't go, I'm about to bill the company for several hours of time in which I won't do any work. Instead of, say, getting paid to ice skate.

How was it? About what you'd expect-- it was 9 in the morning, everyone had just come back from a four day weekend, and they made those who were able to skate do the hokey pokey. Oh, yes, they did. As for me, I wished I didn't go about the moment I showed up and not just because of the aforementioned reasons. Mainly because I got there and realized that I hated Christmas Parties for the most part because of forced interaction with people whose only relationship to you is a working one and as I had been only there for four months and was not really an employee there anyways, I didn't have that much of a relationship to anyone anyways.

Then there was today. My little group, the three other people who also do my job and my boss, went out for what looked like a departmental Christmas lunch. I'm not sure whether it was or not because nobody told me and I wasn't invited. I just know that at around 11:45, they all got up, put on their jackets, and walked out together talking about how they were going to miss something. Of course it makes sense that I wasn't invited to the lunch-- I'm a contractor, a temp. But still, I had been there long enough to have that awkward feeling of knowing that I wasn't invited something to which everybody else was.

And, yes, I do realize that there is a seeming contradiction here, of wanting to go to something for which I couldn't go but then wanting to go to something for which I couldn't go. Well, one involved ice skating at 9 in the morning, the other one lunch-- easy choice there. But mainly it's just that it's the subtle reminder that when it comes down to it, you do not actually belong. In one case, an effort was made to include me. The other one not.