In life, one must have rules. And like anyone else, I have mine.

They are too numerous to mention, but here are the top six:

1. I will never wait in line to get into a bar. There are too many other bars in the world to choose from. And it's one of those weird Catch-22s in life: The only time there is a line to get in a bar, the bar is one of those bars that's not worth waiting in line to go into.

2. I will never watch Oprah, or Dr. Phil, or Jerry Springer, or The View. Life is too short. And those people are too horrible.

3. I will never eat at a Chili's, a Bennigans, or a TGIFs. But it’s okay, if it is the only place in the airport to get a drink, to have a drink there. Every rule must have its exceptions.

4. I will never watch reality TV. It’s bad for the soul.

5. I will never root for the White Sox. If terrorists were to blow up Wrigley Field while the Cubs were playing there, and the only team left in Chicago to root for was the White Sox, I would be a Brewer’s fan.

6. I will never take part in a corporate “Team Building Event.”

Those are some of the more hard-line rules I live by. And I just broke one of them.

No, I didn’t have the deep-fried chili chicken buffalo wing boneless tender three-cheese nachos at Bennigans while watching Springer on the restaurant TV.

But I did participate in a corporate team building event. And . . . this is hard to write . . . I liked it. I completely failed at it, but I liked it.

Here’s the backstory:

I was in London, doing a seminar, sponsored by Ragan, with Marc Wright of Simply-Communicate. Marc is one of my favorite people in the world, and a wonderful host.

He picked me up at the airport and put me up in his English country estate for a night (because for what you pay for a hotel room in London for a night, you could buy a small bungalow on the south side of Chicago).

When I got to Wright Manor, after an all-night flight, his wife Bev had a wonderful English country breakfast waiting for me. Then Marc bundled me off to bed for a couple of hours. When I woke, he had the martinis already ready.

That is a host, people. Then we went to this beautiful little English country town called Marlow, which is right along the Thames, before we ducked into a 300-year-old pub for a pint or two of the local brew, before heading back to Wright Manor for Sunday dinner.

We did everything English but hunt foxes, shoot grouse, and murder someone in the drawing room.

I tell you all this to establish my mood. I was happy. I was agreeable. I was content. I was vulnerable. And then we did the seminar, which was a great success.

So I was even happier. I was even more agreeable. I was even more content. I was even more vulnerable.

And you have to remember, Marc Wright is very charming. And he has that wonderful British accent, which makes him even more charming. So he probably could have asked me to do anything, and I would have agreed.

Had he said to me:

"Mornin, governor! Fancy a bit of buggery, do you? What say we fiddle with the twigs and berries and then get a pint over at the Kensington Arms, what?"

I probably would have agreed. I might have regretted it later, but I would have agreed. I was that content. And that vulnerable.

So when Marc told me he had a surprise for me after Day One of the seminar, I agreed to it immediately.

“He’s probably going to introduce me to the Queen,” I remember thinking. “Or take me to Gordon Ramsey’s for dinner.” The possibilities were endless.

What he did, however, was shanghai me and drag me to a corporate team building event. The bastard! Had I known, I would have opted for the buggery.

Why was Marc, who is a smart sort of chap, going to one of these things? Because he owns several companies, and one of them is Simply Experience, which puts on big events for corporate clients. You know, like 400-person salespeople meetings, and such. Marc will do everything from writing the scripts for the presentations, to coming up with themes, to shooting the video. He’ll do it all.

Well, one company that he sometimes works with is called Catalyst. Catalyst is one of those crazy, funky companies run by young, creative types. They do corporate team building events, and Marc sometimes works with them.

They happened to be having a “party’ that night, and that’s the surprise Marc took me to. The bastard.

At first, it was great. Pretty people walked around with trays of beer, wine, champagne, and nibblies. I was still happy, content, and vulnerable.

But then it happened. The Team Building portion of the evening. Corporate buggery!

About 100 of us were herded into an auditorium where, on the stage, a complete symphony was set up—complete with all the instruments. An entire percussion section, all the strings, all the brass . . . everything.

The idea? According to our fearless leader, the conductor, we were each going to pick an instrument, and within 90 minutes, we would be playing a portion of a symphony together.

I almost pissed myself.

Anyone who knows me knows this: I have no musical talent. None. In fact, I am tone deaf. The last time I tried to something musical was in the fifth grade, when my parents made me play the trumpet.

And once, during rehearsal for a big show, the band leader—a sadistic Nazi if there ever was one—actually stopped the rehearsal, picked up the music book off the stand in front of him, and whipped it at my head.

“Crescenzo!” he shouted, in front of God and everyone. “If you’re not going to practice you don’t have to be here.”

But the thing was, I had been practicing. Really, really hard. I just sucked. Bad.

Here's more proof: Once, when I was about 13, my entire family was gathered around the dining room table with the lights out, singing happy birthday to my brother.

Suddenly, midway through the song, my grandmother got up, turned on the lights, and called a halt to the proceedings.

Looking at me, she said: “If you’re going to make a joke out of it, then you shouldn’t sing at all.”

She thought I was being lousy on purpose! But I wasn’t. I am completely and utterly tone deaf. I just don’t have that club in my bag.

So imagine, if you will, the terror coursing through my heart when they told me that, as part of a team building event, I was going to play an instrument. I was petrified.

Which instrument should I choose? The trumpet was obviously out. Too much baggage. The strings? Ha! Not a freaking chance. Anything that called for multiple fingers doing multiple things was out of the question.

That also eliminated all the reeds and woodwinds.

Trombones? Snare drums? No and no. Was there a triangle I could hit, or some maraca shaky type things? What the hell was I going to do??????

And then I saw it: a thing of beauty, sitting in the back row, calling out to me like a beacon in the night. A big, round bass drum. Like you see in the marching bands.

"I could hit a drum like that," I remember thinking. "I could hit the shit out of a drum like that."

But there were only two of them. I looked around, and I immediately saw seven or eight other guys eyeing my bass drum.

“Teamwork my fat hairless ass,” I remember thinking. “I am getting a bass drum, even if I have to break one of these Brit's ankles to do it.”

This was the Revolutionary War all over again. It was Paul Revere's midnight ride, or Washington crossing the Delaware.

We may have been in the heart of London, but my heart was back at Bunker Hill.

I was ready for war. These modern-day Redcoats didn't stand a chance.

And then the conductor gave the word. Gentlemen and ladies, go choose your instruments. And the race was on.

In my next post, I’ll tell you whether I got the drum, and how the rest of the evening turned out. One hint: it wasn’t pretty.