Worst Party You Have Been To

In My Humble Opinion
1

When I was living in Berlin, a woman I barely knew from brief conversations at a local cafe invited me to her birthday party on Thursday. I declined, but she knew I only lived a block away and insisted I come. Knowing I would continue to see her on a regular basis, I reluctantly agreed to stop by later that night.

I got to her apartment, walked in and there was a huge spread of food and drink. Her apartment was spiffy clean and lots of chairs. However,
other than the birthday girl, I was the only person there.

She tried to be brave, but considering I was a latecomer and no one else had shown up, she was needless to say - upset. At first I thought she was some kind of psycho and had invited me to be the only guest, but she was close to hysterics that not one single friend or family member had arrived and after about ten minutes of small talk, she asked me to leave.

Upswing…dimwit had told me to come Thursday (her actual birthday) but her invites that she had SENT IN THE MAIL, and even a few phoned invites, were all for Friday. Her family and friends thought she moved the date for the weekend and they all showed up Friday night. I heard the party was quite good, other than the fact that some of the sandwiches were a bit stale.

So what is your bad party experience?

2

Most recently, my sister’s husband threw her a 50th birthday party at their favorite club. It wasn’t too bad - until my sister decided to grab the microphone, sit down and open all her gifts and comment on them. I was looking around the room - the only ones enjoying it besides my sis were the two kids who were there.

We escaped shortly thereafter. It’s still embarrassing to think about.

3

While in the Navy many years ago, our shop would hold monthly birthday parties for co-workers and their family members once a month. One month the party was held at the home of a co-worker whose wife was turning 21. Just as the candles on the birthday cakes were lit and happy birthday was going to be sung, the phone rang. The birthday girl that was turning 21 was told her parents had been killed in an auto accident earlier that day. Besides killing that party, the whole monthly birthday get togethers faded away.

4

I’m the resident computer geek at an oil operation in the Middle East. I was working in the field during New Year’s Eve a couple of years ago where myself and a couple of friends got invited over to a co-workers to celebrate. Which, because there are few women here (those that are here tend to be bovine in aspect) and because there is no where else to go, pretty much consisted of going to a guys room, having a few drinks, then being back in your own bed by 10pm because you have to be in the office for work by 6am. Yeehaw!
We arrived at the guy’s trailer at about 7pm. There were already a group of people there from his department. Some were getting pretty drunk (we’re in a Muslim country knuckeheads! Give yourselves a slap!).
One (we assume he did so jokingly) tried to kiss this buddy of mine, Reg, an Australian fellow who weighs in at about 300lbs and in the process pours his drink all over him. Joker ends up getting fired across the room into the closet. Much hilarity ensues. I even got a chuckle out of this.
Apparently there was a sale of miniature cameras because it seemed to be the height of fashion to snap dozens of pictures of the host everytime he got up to make a drink, go to the washroom, or for no reason at all other than he was there. He laughed it off good naturedly which seemed to egg these cretins on all the more. Unfortunately, Brad, who had the misfortune of sitting between camera afficinados and said host is pretty much blinded for the better part of the evening from the flashes.
One of said cretins, known affectionatly as ‘COG’ (because if you ever saw him stretching on the mat in the gym, you’d understand why the host coined the term ‘chalk outline guy’ for him), was sitting in his chair dancing. Yes, in a room full of straight guys (well at least we thought so before we arrived) this guy is sitting in his chair waving his arms in the air dancing to the music! Now I’m not one to begrudge anyone a good time, but at least wait until someone actually turns some music on first!
The average age at this ‘party’ was 35-40 years old. I felt like I was with a bunch of junior high kids who had broken into their parents liquour cabinet. As I commented to the room before my buddies and I left just before 8pm, “You know a party is bad when I’m one of the coolest guys in the room”. My buddies laughed while the cretins took more pictures of the host while he laughed along with us (just before he fired them all out of his room and joined us back at my place for a little quieter and more relaxing evening).

Fallout next day:

  • One guy severely disciplined for being so fall down drunk as to try to kiss a fat humourless Aussie.
  • Another guy who, after getting kicked out of the party above, went to another location where the executives were having a few drinks and decides it is a good idea to moon the VP’s wife while her pre-teen children were in the room. He ends up on the next plane out of the country looking for a new job and trying to think up an excuse to his wife as to why he was fired.
5

When I was working on the island of Trinidad I once went to a party of ex-pats . It was spoiled somewhat when somebody fell out of a tree and broke their leg. What he was doing in the tree in the first place is beyond me. This guy was out here working on a specific project. You can imagine his company were none too pleased . They had to repatriate him back to the UK and arrange for a replacement to be sent to Trinidad at short notice.

6

My husband used to do college theater and still had some leftover friends from the scene. He once dragged me to one of their birthday parties on the other side of the city in the middle of the night. Now, I’m sure there are many great theater people out there, but I happen to absolutely despise the crowd from my university’s theater, and seeing them all post-college was just sad. No, it’s not cool to be 24 and living like you’re 18, acting like you’re 12, and sponging off your parents to do lame performance art. Plus, they’re SO clique-ish in a junior-high sort of way. So I was already dreading it.

First of all, the apartment was so ghetto as to not have a buzzer, and I didn’t have a cell phone, so we resorted to yelling at the second-story window and throwing things. This didn’t work, and Mr. Frail managed to lose his sunglass case to a neighboring windowsill. We finally encountered someone comign from the party who could let us in. Mr. Frail and I were recently engaged, and many of these people knew me (we’d been together for 5 years), but somehow, I was the Invisible Woman. When we stepped into the party, everyone was all, “Mr. Frail! Ohmygod!”…but I was completely ignored, despite my attempts to be friendly. I then watched people play a game involving picking up things with their teeth. (I was not invited to join the game, which is probably all the better.) I tried to signal Mr. Frail that I was having a terrible time, but he was in conversation with someone. When the hostess blew out her candles to a very stoned chorus of “Happy Birthday,” I grabbed my man and told him we were splitting. I explained how much I hated these people and the party. He apologized profusely for taking me to such a shitty party, and most of those losers are no longer his friends, so maybe it wasn’t such a bad thing after all. I haven’t had to go to a theater party since.

7

From the other side of the coin: I’ve given parties where nobody has turned up. It’s really depressing. Those who care to search may find a thread or two.

8

When I was in high school, we threw a surprise party for a friend. She showed up before we were completely ready, and as she opened the door, one of the guests pushed it shut, breaking her finger. We spent the night sitting around watching fondue coagulate and get cold and waiting for the reports from the hostess, who had driven the guest of honor to the ER.

9

Last summer: the only friend I still have from high school invited me to a cookout at her SO’s house, to celebrate the fact that she’d just moved in with him. Besides me she had one friend there, everyone else was his friend or relative (mostly relatives). It was a redneck fest. :frowning:

Now, I grew up with rednecks. For a very long time, my closest friends were all rednecks. I used to love redneck parties. But this one bugged me: these people were ignorant, with no knowledge of or interest in current events (or books, music, TV shows that weren’t Judge Judy, etc.), getting drunk and high in front of their kids on a Saturday afternoon. Basically the same kind of people I spent way too much time partying with when I was younger, but for some reason I was just bored to tears. And I knew the other woman that my friend had invited, so I got to stand in the kitchen and listen to her brag about how her new husband doesn’t let her go out on her own anymore and oh aren’t men silly and gee I guess he just really loves me. :rolleyes:

I left that party with very mixed feelings: I knew I wouldn’t ever go to another party thrown by my friend/her SO, but I felt like a big ol’ snob. I even almost started a MPSIMS thread that night called “I think I’ve outgrown my redneck friends,” but scrapped it when I couldn’t find the words to describe what I meant (and I knew that some people would take it wrong and be offended, while others would take it wrong and be snooty).

Anyway, that was the worst party I’ve ever been to. In fact, I think it might be the only party I’ve ever been to that I didn’t have fun at.

10

Do wedding receptions count? My college roommate got married; her reception lasted fifteen minutes. Which was almost three times as long as the ceremony. So we drove an hour and a half to a wedding location for a five minute ceremony followed by a fifteen minute reception. The couple didn’t have a lot of money, and although her parents were well-off, she didn’t feel comfortable taking money from them. So she and her groom rented a rec room, had a JP marry them in the garden outside, then we came into the rec room for the reception. No music (not even someone’s borrowed tape player – yes, this was a looong time ago), no food, no drinks, just tables and chairs. Wait – they had made kool-aid to drink, so there was punch at least. After about five minutes, my friend said to me, “I think we should cut the cake. There’s nothing else to do.” So they cut the cake, we ate, her dad toasted them with the kool-aid, we drank, they left.

We waved them off, then the young’uns headed to the closest bar. It was a mixed group: friends of the bride’s from high school, college, work, etc. (No friends or family of the groom attended the wedding.) As we sat at a table waiting for the waitress (and contemplating whether 10:30 in the morning is too early for hard-core drinking), the bride’s best friend from first grade says, “Soooo. I give them six months. What do y’all think?”

Funny thing is that, although I’ve lost touch with her (I later said something offensive about her husband’s inability to do anything other than lay on the couch and sponge off her [he found it too stressful to work, so she supported them with her full-time job while going to school full-time]; strangely, she never forgave me), I understand through mutual friends that although it’s been more than ten years, they’re still together.

11

My brother-in-law’s wedding reception. Save her immediate family and her sorority sisters, nobody liked the bride-to-be. My BIL’s friends and family were all there, trying our best to look happy. The later it got, and the drunker we got, the nastier it all got. At one point, we were even making bets as to how long the marriage would last (7 years, if you must know). My BIL came over and we pretended we were making bets as to how long it would be before she got pregnant.

I’m so relieved that his new girlfriend is nice.

12

I thought I had repressed all my bad party memories, but reading the thread dislodged one…

I was in college and visited a boyfriend in Memphis over winter break. Now, I must confess, I am a liberal. So was he. You may or may not be a liberal yourself, but just accept it for the sake of the story.

His parents were not liberal by any means. They were the redneck ignorant variety of conservative. His sister was in fact engaged to his stepbrother. The family regretted that I wasn’t staying another day or 2 b/c they were all getting tickets to a monster truck rally. His parents had been married 7 times, only once to each other.

This trip actually included a 2-fer on the worst parties ever, New Years Eve and New Years Day. New Years Eve his parents through a big bash at their house. Their crazy friend dropped his boxers on the front lawn. Their obese friend broke the toilet seat when she used the bathroom. This kind of stuff can be fun when it’s your college friends, but when it’s your boyfriend’s parents, not so much.

Then there was New Years Day at their friends’ house, which was decorated with all kinds of hunting guns and stuffed animal heads. The conversation was peppered with the N word and rants about welfare cheats. To top it off, I had come down with the flu. The real flu, where you run a fever and feel like you’ve been run over by a train.

The year did get better from there, there was nowhere to go but up.

13

Two I can think of:

First, my best friend in high school’s graduation party. Now, keep in mind, my friend was 18 years old. She spent almost the entire party flirting and cuddling with her fourteen year old neighbor. She’s heading for college (community college, but still, college). He’s going into 8th grade. And this wasn’t some hot, tall, muscular, looks like he’s 18 kid. He’s short, dumpy, looks like he’s about 12. And he acted like he was 10, and was an immature little snot. I don’t know what her deal was (granted, she was pretty immature herself-she had a lot of learning disabilities, and we were starting to grow apart at this point), but I basically spent the party hanging out with her sister and another friend of our’s, cringing whenever this kid came near. Originally, I was going to sleep over, but I ended up getting so annoyed by the two of them, that I left early.

The next day, she tells me they’re dating. Gaaaah.

Second, maybe, oh, about seven years ago, my aunt had a Labor day picnic. That Labor Day, it was pouring outside, and pretty damned chilly, so we figure she’ll just have everyone inside and we’ll watch a movie and chat.

No. She has everyone in her garage. Her freezing cold, damp, smelly garage. The garage door was up, with a tarp over part of the driveway for the grill. Everyone was cold, wet and miserable. Some of my younger cousins were inside watching TV. I had a book in my purse, and went into the living room and read. She kept getting annoyed that people were inside (my aunt is extremely anal about her house. At one of her kids’ graduation parties, she had signs on every door-“NO ONE ALLOWED INSIDE HOUSE WITH FOOD/DRINK”). The smoke from the grill was wafting into the garage where everyone was sitting, giving everyone weasel-eye. Worst “picnic” ever.

14

A New Year’s Party with my exboyfriend. We’d made plans to go to this lovely-sounding party a friend of mine was throwing - dress-up, with champagne and wine and appetizers and all sorts of lovely stuff. But last minute, the ex informs me that he promised an old friend we’d show up at their party, just for a little while. I figure we’ve got enough time to do the quick stopoff at his friend’s house on the other side of town and get back to my friend’s place before midnight.

So we show up to this guys house. There’s pickup trucks randomly scattered on the lawn, and the smell of weed is reeking all the way from the house. And I’m dressed for the other party, in a gorgeous dress and heels. Ah well. We go inside, and there are four or five snotnosed rugrats screaming and running around the house while their parents smoke (pot and cigarettes) right in front of them. Un. Comfortable! I’m there for all of 30 minutes before I simply must get out, but boyfriend doesn’t want to go, and had managed to down a tonne of beer and smoke a joint somewhere in there. He can’t drive. So, I take the keys, leaving him the house key, because there was a spare under the mat. I drive off, have an okay time at the fabulous party (I was the only one there without a date, and in a bad mood, and couldn’t drink too much because I was driving), and get home around 2a.m. Where I find that no, the house key is not under the mat. I use my cell to call the ex, who is so drunk I’m suprised he can put words together, who tells me that Oops! He lost his key last week so he took the one from under the mat. He promises me he’ll get a cab right away. So, I really, really have to go to the bathroom. I wait and wait and wait and he’s not home, I end up peeing by a shrub IN MY OWN BACKYARD, and fall asleep in the car. He gets home at 10am, because “All the cabs were busy” and no one could drive. And does. not. apologize. at. all. I slept in the car OUTSIDE MY HOUSE! I peed in a bush OUTSIDE MY HOUSE! And this is all my fault for not wanting to hangouts with some rednecks smoking pot in front of their kids.

WORST. PARTY. EVER.

Man, what was I thinking with that guy?

15

Oh boy, don’t make me recount the lesbian potluck stories.

16

Lesbian potluck? As in “you can come to the party if you bring a lesbian and a side dish?” :smiley:

17

Not quite. The parties hosted by this lesbian couple I knew (long since broken up) were always bad.

They hosted a New Year’s potluck (93/94). Gina invited all of her twenty-something gay friends (myself included), and Linda invited all of her forty-something straight co-workers. Our group stayed in one little room while the other stayed in the kitchen. Absolutely no interaction.

This club kid (we used to call him “Little Bird” after the Annie Lennox song) got massively drunk on Linda’s booze early on. I went with a friend and we arrived a bit late, as the place was way the fuck up in Montreal North, where neither of us had ever been before. As soon as we walked in the door, our friend Jorge came up to us and said “Tank God jou’re 'ere. Eet’s a disaster.”

Linda decided to make deep fried frogs’ legs. Fine. But as my group were getting ready to leave – to find something better to do on New Year’s Eve – Linda came up to us and asked us to pay her because she had spent a lot on the frogs’ legs.

Isn’t a potluck where everyone brings something to share? If you decide to make something expensive, that’s your bloody problem.

I was like, “Fuck that, I brought two huge bottles of wine that everyone drank.” But my friend Tara, in her calm yet bitchy manner, put Linda in her place. Tara handed her two dollars (the price Linda was asking from everyone) and said, “Here. I had a couple of spoonfuls of pasta salad.” And turned on her heel.

We ended up at a really bad drag show, and rang in the New Year on the metro.

The second lesbian potluck was actually a barbecue/pool party.

[ul][li] Linda blocked off most of the house, including the bathroom, with baby safety gates, to keep us out.[/li]
[li] Gina, a wannabe DJ, rented a few thousand dollars’ worth of equipment, including gigantic speakers, which she placed right next to the above-ground pool. You can imagine what happened when we went swimming.[/li]
[li] Linda turned the barbecue off before half of us had finished cooking. She refused to turn it back on.[/li]
[li] Other lesbians got drunk and started catfighting on the patio. [/ul][/li]
Good times, good times.

18

Although this party in itself was fun, some of the circumstances… not so much.

At the time, my husband reported to the President of a large, privately-held company. This was a surprise party for the President’s birthday, held at an expensive hotel downtown. I bought a new outfit for the occasion: a cream-colored sequin top and a black skirt with large, distinctive cream-colored silk flowers.

We get to the party, and I immediately see that the President’s wife is wearing the exact same skirt (although with a black top). There were about 100 people there, so I just made sure to stay at the opposite end of the room from his wife and looked forward to sitting down to dinner, where no one will be able to see either of our skirts.

During dinner, I got up to use the restroom. When I left my stall, some woman came up to me.
Her: “So! I see you’re wearing Margie’s skirt.”
Me: (trying to laugh it off): “Yes, well, I figure, if you’re going to come to a party dressed as anyone, it might as well be the hostess, right?”
Her: “Well, I’m sorry, but you need to go home now, because that’s just wrong.”
Me: “Oh, but my husband and I are having such a good time. I think I’ll stay.”
Her: “No, you need to go home. That’s just wrong.”
Me: “I think I’ll stay.”

She gave me the full-body once-over, looked me in the eye and said, “Well, you look pretty. Verrrrrry pretty.” And walked out.

Another woman in the bathroom – connected to the President’s parents/owners of the company, then came up to me and told me not to worry about it and to go have a good time. I had been planning on skipping the dancing so as to hide my skirt, but after that, I thought, “Fuck it. I’m dancing.” and tore up the dance floor, skirt and all. I later found out that the mean woman was the President’s wife’s sister, and a renowned bitch. So score one for me and fasion faux pas.

19

If they started making out after about a minute of fighting, I think I saw the movie.

20

Ones in which:
[ul]You don’t know another soul there except for the person you came with, and
[/ul]
[ul]Everyone there thinks that they, not you, should be dating that person.
[/ul]I’ve been to a couple like that and they blew enormous chunks.