(Originally appeared in The National Post, as a sidebar to an article written by Samantha Grice, December 13, 2006)

Here are Chris and Noel's Holiday Office Party Tips based partly on lessons accrued from studying the world's most impressive drunkards featured in The Man Who Scared a Shark to Death and Other True Tales of Drunken Debauchery, as well as those drawn from field `research' hanging around various water coolers across the world.

1. While you may want to skip home in sheer delight at not having offended anyone during your company's holiday hootenanny, remember to step lively and keep a keen eye out for open manhole covers. If you don't you might end up like a Korean man did following his company's year-end blowout: the man fell 18 feet into an open sewer, where he spent the next 8 days sleeping on a foam mat and sipping from a puddle of clean water before his screams for help caught the attention of a passerby.

2. Remember that everybody loves a good office romance -- it is a valuable font for the injection of subtle innuendo into everyday conversation. Just remember to be discreet and if you get up to any hanky panky at your office party find a quiet place or a storage closet. Do not, as a U.K. couple dubbed by a tabloid there "The Millennium Bonkers", choose as your spot of passion a place such as the Millennium Dome shortly after the year 2000 was rung in.

3. If you and your special someone attend the party together and you have had too many slurps out of the ole' spiked punch bowl, it is usually advisable for your better half to take the wheel on the drive home. Proving the exception to every rule was a Virginian taking a similar course of action -- the girlfriend passing the keys to her more lucid boyfriend -- the kink in this plan being the boyfriend's eyesight: he was blind.

4. If your office party is being held on a rural highway in the dead of winter and, falsely warmed by drink, you decide to go on a pointless hunt for cigarettes wearing only a thin frock, you might very well, as one drunk did, end up with frostbite after passing out in a snowbank. Litigation is your friend in such an instance: the fellow in question won $850,000 after suing police for their failure to retrieve him before frostbite set in.

5. Remember that while condo units do tend to look identical from the outside, the numbers on the individual doors are highly significant and you should make a point of knowing yours. A legless accountant forgot this and, thinking he was home sweet home, pulled a woman out of her apartment, locked the door behind him and passed out naked in the bedroom. Sweet dreams were later marred by the local constabulary.

Credit: CanWest News Service