The office environment is usually an official one (unless you work for Google, but most companies are not Google). However, sometimes when the emotions escalate (negative or positive ones, it doesn’t matter), not only does the office become more unofficial, but even there may be some damage caused to it (even if it’s just an aesthetic sort of damage). To make the picture even more colourful, sometimes the reason the emotions escalate is alcohol which means that once an uncontrollable bursts occurs, there is no turning back for at least ten minutes, which is time enough to destroy half the office and require for the boss to hire a cleaning company to deal with the cleaning component of the aftermath. I know that at the moment things look confusing, but by the time you’re finished reading this post, everything will be clear and you will see the tragic and the comic sides of the matter.

Let me start from the beginning – the morning. One of the colleagues called in sick. It was supposed to be a normal and boring day at the office, with a few of absent due to sickness. Although the temperature in the office was quite high, the outside didn’t offer such pleasant conditions – it was cold, dark and somewhat lonely. Kensington had never looked so dead. It was like one of the scenes in zombie films in the beginning, when everything is dark and quiet – even too quiet, and then the zombies suddenly appear and panic starts spreading like fire sales in the end of each season. No zombies appeared, however, but the atmosphere was really the calm before the storms.

In the early afternoon, as we were working normally one of the colleagues (the one who called in sick in the morning) suddenly appeared in the office, drunk as an Irishman on St Patrick’s day, with a bottle of Scotch in his hand. He was barely standing and the incoherent sounds coming out of his mouth gave us the illusion that he wanted to convey some sort of a message. Soon, everything became clear – he was mad at a co-worker for some reason and after shouting for a few minutes and disturbing the workflow in the whole office, right before the security came, he attacked the subject of his drunken hatred. It was a disturbing sight – they started rolling around, making a mess of the place and breaking a monitor and a printer.

The boss had seen what was happening and had already called the police, while the rest of us frozen into position by the amount of ridiculousness in the situation. Soon, the coppers came, the drunken attacker was fired and had to pay for the damage, but our other colleague decided not to press charges. The whole situation was about a woman and he didn’t want to ruin the other guy’s life. Although he was already in enough trouble as it was.

A cleaning company was called to clean the mess. Cleaning Experts was the name of the company (this is their site – http://www.cleaningexperts.co.uk) and they dispatched a unit as soon as possible. No work was done until the end of the day. The boss let us go home and relax. It was a somewhat traumatic experience for some but personally I found it funny how some people can ruin their lives for nothing. Idiots!