Choose your own office party adventure

As the final minutes tick by on another day's toil, you find yourself returning to the same familiar thoughts: Why do they even schedule work in December? Everyone is checked out, planning a vacation or a gift purchase or the next fight to pick with their mother. It would be only humane to cut everyone loose at Thanksgiving. At least tonight is the holiday party, and the company even splurged to book the swanky midtown speakeasy The Volstead. Not bad.

Arriving at the party locale, you can't possibly raise the first drops of employer-sponsored alcohol to your lips fast enough. However, as you belly up to the bar, you're hit with a quick, heart-skipping flashback to last year's humiliation. "Start slow," you'd warned yourself afterward. Easier said than done, you think. Now the barman is staring you down impatiently. What's your order?