One of my coworkers quit to take another job across town, so she had a little going-away get together/happy hour at a nearby establishment.
Invitations went out at work, but my Outlook filters apparently performed a permanent-delete because when someone forwarded me her invitation to the event I didn’t know about, I saw that I was on copy. Okay.
I wasn’t at work the week this was happening so I forwarded it home as a reminder, but I forgot anyway.
Sorry, I’m getting all tangential like those food blogs.
Another coworker I do hang out with outside of work called me that afternoon to ask if I was going. I told him I probably wouldn’t make it because I was about to head out to do some other things that would probably keep me busy until it was too late to be worth showing up. This happened to be true.
“Oh,” he lamented, “I was just hoping there would be someone there for me to talk to.”
I sympathized, but this is how I avoid the problem of attending an event that doesn’t have people I’d like to spend the whole duration trying to be sociable with: I don’t go.