One Last One

To set the stage, you have to understand that it’s been a long week of imbibement and merriness. On Wednesday the five of us on my team went out for a celebratory dinner with our client peep Sam to the most beautiful restaurant in all of Nelspruit. Seriously, it could rival any restaurant in the NYC or anywhere. We sat at the highest point of the city, had amazing food (the calamari infused with lemon balsamic stuff is brilliant (check out my new Britiness coming through), experienced our first Nelspruit blackout, and had the most romantic evening that six platonic people could share. Oh yeah, the point --- some of us finished off entire bottles of wine each. Oopsies. They shall remain nameless.

Thursday was our final presentation, and those with the wine still in their system needed a nap in the morning to be able to get through the day. The presentation went fantabulous, and by 4:00 we headed to the funnest bar ever since college, the Jock and Java. I can say that it was the most fun that I’d had since the Friday before at the Jock, with the whole entire team – all 12 of us – there along with our clients, random friends and hangers-on and buckets and buckets and buckets of endless drinkies. For some of us the night went long long long…

It is with this background that I can share our last night together. With a collective 7 hours of sleep from the prior two nights, a four hour car ride to Johannesburg, and utter exhaustion from a month of complete craziness comes my favorite conversation of the month…

8:00 PM in the lobby
Jen: “We should all meet for one last drink”
Jessie: “I’m not sure, I think I’m kind of done.”
Jen: “Just one, though, and then we’re all going to crash”
Jessie: “Ok, one is cool”.

8:20 at the bar – Jen is holding the drink menu, which strangely only has bottles available
Jessie: “What are we splitting?”
Jen: “Don’t know, I was thinking champagne”
Jessie: “So, we’ll get a bottle for the two of us?”
Jen: “Ok”

8:25 at the bar – Jen doesn’t like the champagne
Jen: “I don’t like it”.
Jessie: “So get another bottle for yourself and I’ll keep this one”

8:50 at the bar – drinks are low so Jessie & Jen simultaneously reach under the table to grab their respective entire bottles of champagne
“So much for just one”

10:30 at the bar – after teaching the rules to the non-alcoholics, we play my first game of Asshole in about 8 years with 5 men left standing, and the waterfall social is widely embraced. Oooofa.

11:00 we get kicked out of the bar but order just one last bottle for the road, even though no one could function through the tiredness and alcohol any longer. It really was “the last one”.





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