Ze ladies, they love the bow tie.
(But not the eye patch.)

The [My employer] Christmas party was last night, held from 5:30 PM to 8:30 PM in the lobby of our building. Now, I’m glad that [My employer] is not spending 1999 dotcom-boom-style dollars on a holiday party. However, I anticipated that the party was going to be kind of lame, so I decided to liven it up for myself by wearing a tuxedo and an eyepatch. (Plus, I’ll take any excuse to wear an eyepatch; like Seanbaby, my junior-high-school idea of the coolest guy in the world was someone who probably wore an eyepatch and, before doing anything, yelled “Rock and roll!”)

My other reason is that office parties seem kind of like high school parties. Except with money and power substituting for popularity. There’s still cliques, there’s still the shy kids hovering in the margins by the buffet table, there’s still the low-level anxiousness. So I selected the John Hughes party-anxiousness-coping strategy, wore a dinner jacket to work, and glued some holly leaves to my formal satin eyepatch.

So, here’s the result of my social engineering experiment:

1. Tuxedo and eyepatch: Laughter, enthusiastic thumbs up. Pretty girls smile, say hi, and wave — but rapidly find something to do at the other end of the room.
   
2. Tuxedo only, no eyepatch: Pretty girls talk to me (example above.)
   

Okay, that seems like a pretty clear lesson.