Hubris.co.nz

Tom posted on the Wellingtonista recently about the places to drink for free. Join me as I try to score free drinks every week until the end of the year.

For the first in my series, tonight I’m going to the

“AUT Alumni Cocktail function is this Thursday from 6 – 8 pm. at Hotel Inter-Continental.”

You can sneak in and join me there, and I’ll report back on how it is when I come home, including analysis of the food, the selection of drinks, the company and how much I got out of it and its approximate monetary value.

The event itself

Companion: Fellow AUT Alumni Shirley, and if we were bad sort of people, we may have snuck someone else in under the pretext that they were in our class. But we’re not bad people, honest.

Venue: The drinks were held at the Hotel Intercontinental, in one of the function rooms. It was a very bland space designed for around 30 people. Arm chairs were around the walls, and there were a couple of small tables in the middle of the room, cleverly placed for putting down empty drink glasses, and with bowls for rubbish. An effort was made to make them look more interesting by scattering flat blue glass marbles on top. The bar table was near the entrance door, which was guarded by an AUT staffer to make sneaking in people without them being added to the mailing list much harder. Some of the lights in the windowless room weren’t turned on, allowing the non-AUTer to lurk in the shadows more. Oh, and the toilets had individual hand towels. Classy.
How good was it?: I hadn’t been to the Intercontinental since we went there for KateB’s 12th birthday dinner when it was the Park Royal, so that was nice to do something different, but it was an incredibly bland space.

Drink: The bar had bottles of Montana wine displayed in classy silver bottle-coolers – Lindauer, Sav and a red I didn’t inspect. The beer range was Monteiths and Heineken, and in an unusual touch, they also had a cruet-holder with classy bottles of raspberry, lime and lemon syrups, as well as a range of mixers, suggesting that maybe there were spirits behind the bar. But given how long it took to get a glass of wine poured (there was only one girl behind the bar, who struggled with the Lindauer cork for aaaages), I didn’t bother asking for a mixed drink so I can’t confirm that they were actually offering spirits, or what brand they were.
Tally: 4 glasses bubbly ($28 value in a bar, $9 at home)

Food: Food was brought around on small platters by one waiter, who didn’t circle the room properly, so most of the food went to the people nearest the door, dammit! It consisted of mini sushi (I hate sushi), coconut-crusted prawns (they looked so good I almost tried one, but I don’t like prawns either), rare roast beef on polenta bites (really yummy) and tiny pieces of cheese on tiny bagel chips (only one lot of these circulated as far as I saw).
Tally: 3 pieces beef, 1 piece cheese – I’m estimating the catering was $2.50 per menu selection per person, with 2 or 3 items offered for each thing, so maybe a $5 catering value.

People: There weren’t many nametags left when we went in, but it turned out that there weren’t all that many people there at all. We were pounced on for conversation when we entered, and gradually we started talking to other ex-comms people, all at a very superficial level. There was, however, one woman there who might be a valuable business contact for both Shirley and I, so that’s a good start.

Scoring factor: Zilch. It was almost all entirely corporate women, or older men associated with AUT. And it was far too civilised to start to find out juicy details about the people.

Celebrities: Gemma Gracewood, who didn’t stay long.

Gifts: We got AUT Alumni Network branded pens when we left. They’re silver, with a padded grip and quite classy. However, when you work in an office, good pens lose their novelty value. Unless this one can write in SPACE! Which I don’t think this one can. I also got an AUT-branded lanyard on my name badge, which I’m sure I can be put to good use as a red accessory for my work ID instead of the usual pale blue I use.

Total freebie value: We were only there for around an hour out of its two hour window, so had Shirley not wanted to go and catch up with our mysterious friend who went out for a cigarette and didn’t come back, I could have made better use of the bar. But with such a small group of people assembled (20) and only one bar person, frequent trips to the bar would have been more noticeable and frowned on. Still, it cost me only a quick application of eyeshadow and a ten minute stroll from work, and I got to hang out with Shirley, and then her mysterious friend’s friend bought me a drink in the hotel bar afterwards, so not a waste of time at all. A fine start to free drinks each week, me thinks.

Bulletpoints are really a whole lot easier than writing coherant paragraphs, aren’t they? So would you be disturbed if I did another bulletpoint update? Of course you wouldn’t. You love me, right? Right?

• My RSS is back. Well, at least if you’re using Bloglines anyway.
• My palms are no longer orange. Yeah, I bought this moisturiser, right, made in NZ, parabefen free, all natural ingrediants, ladida, with “hint of summer” type stuff about it, and used it liberally for a couple of days, and then one day when I was meeting with a client (are they clients? You’re ALL my clients, technically) and drinking a cup of coffee, I realised that while my legs and arms were lightly golden, my palms were totally fanta pants. Whoops! Moral of the story: rub it in with the back of your hands. And exfoliate with my awesome sugar scrub lots.
• You know how in my last post I said I was in love with the Quiz Master at the Southern Cross? Well that night he called me pretty, so everyone got to see me blush and giggle like I was twelve. Okay, so maybe it was phrased like “Are you sure your team’s big enough?” Me: “I don’t even know the names of those guys over there, they’re just here to look pretty” and he said “Isn’t that your job?” but I don’t care. Swoon and giggle. I enjoy being 12, it’s a lot simpler than other crap.
• The past two nights I have been making sweet love to my couch out of exhaustion. I am so so so in love with Vince from The Mighty Boosh and also Sid from Skins which made me cry again. But tonight I am going to catch up for a drink with my six-weeked boss from that last job that I loved, then hang with DylNuts. Tomorrow I am going to Miss Lisa’s house to escape wrestling-watching.
• I also love love love that on Public Address System we turned a discussion about rugby into one about the awesomeness of Exile in Guyville.
• And finally I’ve been reading I like you by Amy Sedaris, which I LOVE, and you should read it too, but only after you’ve read You’re so entertaining by me, so you don’t think I copied, cos I didn’t. Her descriptions of cooking for first dates have reminded me of how much I want to go on A Date (capital letters). Someone want to have a First Date with me? It’d be like, awkward but awesome. And it can be a no strings American-style affair. Let’s do it!

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Bullet point lists make the world go around, right?

• The everscrumptious Miss Heather has switched over my site design for me, so bear with me while the kinks are ironed out. My semi-secret RSS feed seems to have temporarily vanished, and of course Twitter is blocked at work, so I’m not sure if that’s feeding in properly, but now at least if you run my site through a validator (don’t!) you should only get four or so errors and not sixty like the old one. Goodbye to the hump though, sadly.
• If you receive a text message from me that sounds a little strange, it’s because I no longer have an ’8′ key on my phone, so therefore I have no ‘t’, ‘u’ or ‘v’. It makes things like giving directions to Superfino read “On Ghznee s, opposie Bdg Cars, by Bicoria S”. That makes perfect sense, right? Also, do make your way to Superfino, please. We spent a very pleasant Friday night there. I recommend the Pear & Vanilla Punch especially, but not reaaaaally the Blood-Orange and Cinnamon Martini.
  

• We’ve taken to going to the Quiz at the Southern Cross on Tuesday nights. By “we” I mean sometimes some Wellingtonistas, and sometimes my sisters & Bambi. I am, just for a change, in love with the Quizmaster. You know how I fancy people who know more things about something than I do (music, depression, computers or – in the olden days – drugs), that rule of course applies to someone who has the answer sheet on quizes.
• Before you come up to the Cross for the quiz, I’d like to recommend Le Metropolitain for dinner, and I’d say that even if I hadn’t been called “Madame Jo” on the phone in a hot French accent that I discovered was attached to a hot French waiter. He brought me the wine list when I was waiting by myself instead of making me wait, and was efficient, friendly and good. Everyone’s favourite public servant blogger might not approve of their cassolet, but damn my cow face (read: beef cheeks) were tasty, and since Bambi ordered snails I got to try them for the first time. They tasted like mushrooms, while the mushrooms that they were served with tasted like garlic and cream.
  
• You might have gathered due to the increase in the number of photos that I’m displaying that I’ve taken to carrying my new camera with me everywhere. That’s because the batteries don’t fall out, and it’s got a 1 gig card in it. And I like taking photos, of course. I’ve started to take a series of portraits of people with ‘my eyes’:
  

  

  

• I’ve been watching Season One of Veronica Mars with my lovely new flatmate Kat. She guessed who the killer was correctly, which I didn’t manage to do the first time I watched it. She’s a smart one, that girl. I love watching shows with big reveals that I know are coming up with others, although her little shriek when the killer was in the back seat was nothing compared to Lisa on finding out who killed Laura Palmer. Kat’s fiance Kane is a pro-wrestler! How awesome is that? It means he has no fear of cavorting around in tights, which he demonstrated in his costume as a ballet dancer at Country Club: Back in the USSR on Saturday night.
• I haven’t downloaded my photos from Back in the USSR, but once I do, you’ll be able to see a steady progression from tipsy into disturbingly intoxicated, despite all the food – I made pierogi, and potatoes, and sausages, and Frances and Karen both brought blini, and there was caviar as well, and chips, and really disgusting solid rye bread, and kisial – which was of course vodka jelly, and Moscow Mules, and by the end of the night there was white rum as well. Some people had splendid costumes – Anji brought along a bear so I had to hump him. I also gave lap dance versions of the panda dance to the boys who were complaining about the poor service at Dream Girls that they’d got the night before. My heart bleeds for them. The party was lots and lots of fun, and I was stoked with the turn out. I gave someone a big long speech about how I am not what they need, and how they really shouldn’t fancy me. I thought it was a pretty convincing speech, and it was the right thing for me to do, so I was a little disturbed when I woke up next to the speech recipient. I would be later more disturbed to discover that somehow a glass of water had managed to get knocked into my underwear drawer, leaving me with moist panties everywhere. It was a much nicer discovery, when I finally got up at 6pm on Sunday though, to find that the whole house had been cleaned. WOO! And then last night over flat dinner I heard that people had been spraying my new Cinderella Coconut Bathroom Cleaner into their mouths as it is billed as being so very non toxic. Disturbing!