The Argyle Night out.

There is a tacit agreement that personal things that happen outside the office, stays outside the office. Unfortunately this makes for poor blogging since you cannot share the hilarious bits if any of your readership are co-workers. So as a compromise, I'll try to avoid naming names, but keep the events as they were.

Our destination on Friday night was the Argyle in the city. The Argyle in the Rocks is a fantastic venue and one I would clearly recommend for the more refined crowd. It is very much a bar, not a pub and caters for a different crowd. Note I said refined, not a yuppie bar like Bar333. People here are well dressed and out for a good time, not just showing off their corporate credentials. It is a very different vibe. There is adequate seating and large areas for standing around or dancing, there is food and the drinks are reasonably enough priced. The music is quite loud, but its still possible to hold a conversation and its the kind of club dance music I like anyway.

The surroundings are very 'old-Sydney' like. Rustic wood and cobblestones feature prominently. The toilets are the exception to this style and they are truly amazing. Completely impractical, but amazing. The women's and the men's toilets are kept together and the men's urinals are one man troughs behind these pillars. No one has any idea whether someone is behind the pillar. And since the women and men both share the toilet, the line is equally long for guys as girls, instead of the typical guy line being almost instant. It was a great relief to find the second *normal* toilet, which almost no one else was using. (I'll keep the location a secret so that its equally accessible next time I go).

The queues are a bit random. When we arrived at 7:50, there almost no queue. Then around 9, my guy mates couldn't get in because of the queue. Then around 10, my good friend Chez drops in to hang with me and gets in with no effort. This could be partly cos the line was smaller, but I suspect this is due to the 'hot chicks get in with no effort' policy that most bars/clubs have.

It was a great night. In the middle of it all, most of the crowd was non-compos-mentis, to the point where the security guards were threatening to throw us out. As as the night wore on, everyone sobered up quite agreeably. As expected those who spoke great things about their drinking abilities were the worst off, whilst the quiet ones were the ones who drank as much as the others and didn't skip a beat. Of course some people did some really daft things like mixing drink types so its to be expected that they were sick before long!

The highlight of my night has to be our resident 'hot chick' approaching a woman whose (rather large) breasts were falling out of incredibly revealing dress and basically mocking her in front of the sleazebags who were hanging with her. I dared her to do it and I cracked up laughing after she did it.

We left around 12:30 which may seem early, but we needed to catch the last train and more significantly, the important people in this group were just too drunk and tired and it seemed prudent to take them home. All in all, it was a great night and one which should be repeated.

Lady I wasn't born yesterday...

So I went to Bar333 at Wynyward for Marty's farewell party. It was great to catch up with friends and to see Marty before he left forever to HK, but I had this particularly off putting moment during the night.

I went to buy a drink at the bar, and I started looking at the cocktail menu. This very pretty chick asks me for it next. I was fairly certain what I wanted, so I give it to her and just strike up a conversation with her while we waited for service. All seemed to go ok until she turns around to chat to her friend. At this very instant, I get served and then she turns back and goes, damn could you add my drink onto your order...she didn't have cash in her hand, so its an obvious, buy me a drink scenario.

I'm thinking "Lady I wasn't born yesterday.." and I lied saying "Sorry I'm short, but I can get the bartender to serve you next and you can handle it." Just as I suspected she started to ignore me after that. I was not at all surprised, and frankly would have loved to have seen the look on her face when I didn't pay for it (cos we had a bar tab for Marty's group) . Realistically I would have bought her something if she kept talking, but she was clearly just a bar fly thinking I'm an easy guy to fake. Maybe theres a protocol for this, but realistically I'm not interested in cheapskates, regardless of how good looking they are.

It was definitely as annoying a moment as finding out the new girl downstairs Kirsty (or Kristy?) had a boyfriend and is also an young-un. Seriously where can a guy find a nice girl these days? No don't say RSVP...that's not happening..EVER!