Friday nights at OT...

When I was still in my previous job, some of my colleagues, including my best friend Tey, would usually stay back at the office on a Friday night.

One, Manila + Friday night is a recipe for horrible traffic. Two, there is more work to be done. Hehe!

The good thing is that our office was smack in the middle of the business district. That meant having easy access to the malls, drinking places, etc.

On certain nights where we didn't feel like heading to Greenbelt or we just wanted something very laidback, very casual, we would go to this place along De la Costa called OT.

It was a stone's throw away from the office and on many nights, it served as our version of the bar that Ally Mcbeal and her colleagues would hit.

There ws nothing fantab about OT. People were allowed to smoke. Food was your regular stuff. When you leave, you bring with you the combined smell of cigarette smoke, smoked food and so on. LOL!

But we love the place for two things - cheapo buckets of San Mig Lights and cheapo karaoke. Haha! We're talking about five peso per song here.

If I remember correctly, karaoke starts at 10PM. By then, there would be quite a few tables occupied with fellow yuppies who wanted to relax but nothing too formal and chichi (chichi talaga?!). Most of them were colleagues from other departments - Engineering, IT, Customer Service, and us Public Affairs.

Because we'd always see each other

A catalogue of the songs would be passed around and we would take note of the number code for the songs we wanted to sing. We'd give the piece of paper to the waiter who would then key in the numbers to the karaoke machine. Haha!

And for the next two hours, we would have our own karaoke night. No one cared how you sung the song. When you had the mic, you owned the place. LOL. No fights erupted. No broken bottles or noses. Just pure, unapologetic singing. Haha!

Good times, good times, indeed!