my own little world is what i deserve

Typing is currently difficult, because I took full advantage of TGIM--'thank goodness it's Monday', which is a tradition that could only happen in Ireland. Here, rather than bemoaning the fact that the work week has started again, everyone goes out for a pint (or five) instead. It really amazes me how different the work culture is here. Even though I had a million things to do tonight, I realized that I could only finish a small fraction of what I have to do, so I went out instead--but that put me in the solid majority, whereas I would have felt like a complete slacker in the US. I suppose it helps that people in this office get 25 vacation days per year, while I only get fifteen; but people also take a full hour for lunch, while I tend to eat at my desk, and people lock their laptops in their file cabinets before going home, while I take mine with me and work from my apartment later in the evening. Anyway, TGIM was held at the former Kitty O'Sheas, which has been refurbished in the last week and turned into an awful hotel bar; so this was the last TGIM to be held there, and the main topic of discussion was where to shift TGIM for the upcoming weeks. Given the fact that the core group of TGIM'ers has a self-designed tshirt and an internal mailing list, I think it's safe to say that this tradition is taken quite seriously. I followed the pub crawl in its truest form by having a drink at TGIM, followed by drinks at three other establishments. After two pints of Guinness, a baby Guinness (not beer at all, but rather a shot of kahlua with a floater of Baileys so that the shot looks like a Guinness--brilliant!), a smirnoff ice, and a double shot of Baileys (which looked like about ten shots of Baileys, since it was in a brandy snifter full of ice), I came home with the realization that there's no way that I'm going to be as fully competent tomorrow morning as I would like to be. I have a training from 9am to 6pm on how to be a successful mentor, which is rather silly since I've been mentoring people for a couple of years, so it's probably too late to fix my bad habits--but then again, I know some people who could really benefit from an improvement in my life-coaching skills, so hopefully I'll gain something from this. Unfortunately, I also have a conference call at six-thirty p.m., which I need to prep things for, but that means I have to prep it before the all-day training, which means I should really be in the office by seven-thirty. That, of course, necessitates sleeping off all of the alcohol which is causing me to use the backspace button about 150% more often than I usually do, so I suppose I should go to bed!