Date 24: Work Hard, Play Hard.

Date: Saturday, 1/28/12
Type: Formal Gathering
Cost: $
Planned By: Adam
Adam invited me to go to his work's annual IT Event this past weekend. It is a semi-formal gathering held at the beginning of each year. The event consisted of a gourmet buffet, casino games, dancing, and a big raffle at the end.

The event didn't start until 7PM so when we got there we went straight to the buffet line for dinner. We had roast beef, mashed potatoes and mixed vegetables. They also had a Chinese buffet so I made sure to get a fortune cookie! Even though the company booked the entire floor of a hotel for this event we had a very difficult time finding somewhere to sit to eat.

 

After we ate we got our $100 casino chip and looked around for a good casino game to play. We chose The Wheel! You pick a number 1-9 and if the wheel lands on your number you win. The lady in charge of the wheel was hilarious. Because it wasn't real money being gambled she liked giving away some chips, and rigging the wheel to help us all win. Even without her help I was doing pretty well! For every $50 in casino chips we had at the end of the night we could put one ticket in the raffle. Adam and I ended up with over $6,000 combined so we got a lot of tickets. The bad thing though was that we had to write our name and phone number on all of them. It took us awhile, but we finished it in time.

After we got all our tickets in we went to the dessert buffet and got some delicious brownies. We went to the ballroom to wait for the raffle drawing. We danced a little while we waited, but we didn't want to embarrass ourselves in front of Adam's coworkers so we kept it to a minimum. First, they did the raffle for a ton of gift cards. We didn't win any. Then they put up a list of people who one the big prizes (TVs, Xbox, Vegas Vacation, etc). We didn't win any of those either. :( We were a little bummed out, but we had a lot of fun so we didn't let it get to us. We decided to run for the coat check and head on out after the raffles were done to beat the other 500 people to the parking garage.

Overall, it was a very nice night out. We got to dress up and go downtown together, I got to meet some people that Adam works with and It was great socializing with people and not having to spend very much money.