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Corporate Christmas Gifts
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- Lemon Quarter
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Re: Corporate Christmas Gifts
I think I must be the odd man out in the Corporate Christmas Gift League. For all of my career I was an academic and/or an independent consulting engineer (the jobs overlapped). At no time did I ever receive a Corporate Christmas Gift of any variety. In my first junior academic appointment, the Head of Department came round and personally wished everyone a happy Christmas - that was a nice touch. On my next appointment (in a different University) I was expected to contribute to a collection - to provide a Christmas Gifts for the lower orders!
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- Lemon Half
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Re: Corporate Christmas Gifts
Howyoudoin wrote:Ha. Glad to see you're back Mel, I was worried about you (yes really).
Seconded. Great to have you back, Mel!
My area of the meeja doesn't get as many freebies as most people suppose - a diary here, a pen and pencil set there. I'd have to go to trade exhibitions to pick up anything better, and I just can't be @rsed. I did, however, receive one Christmas freebie that was rather awesome.
It arrived in what might as well have been a golden coach - a very flash limo pulled up, bearing a sizeable crate of goodies. Specialist Italian foods, several very classy wines, olive oil, cufflinks, calendars, glassware, and one of the most breathtakingly beautiful books I've ever owned - an entire stretch of the Italian coastline, photographed in contiguous camera shots, absolutely jaw-dropping.
Inside was a signed letter from somebody called Silvio Berlusconi. Who was due to go to prison very shortly for bribery, tax fraud, jury-rigging, having sex with minors at bunga-bunga parties, and god knows what else. (I forget the actual charges, but those were a fair representative sample.) And who had presumably decided that my helpful influence would be worth buying.
Mystifying. Still, look on the bright side. At least he didn't send me a horse's head.
BJ
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- Lemon Quarter
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Re: Corporate Christmas Gifts
Many moons ago whenI was but a lowly dole clerk a miner (local colliery closed down) gave me a packet of polos. Next thing I knew I was in the manager's office and being threatened with the sack for accepting a bribe!!!! Luckily my union rep, a fearless chap by the name of Douglas marched in and pointed out that if I was to be sacked for accepting a packet of polos what was going to happen to the manager for accepting a large bottle of whisky from a brewery that operated in the area. The manager tried to bluster but Douglas pointed out that the person who presented the gift from the brewery was his brother in law so nothing the manager said was going to cut any ice. I always hated the manager after that and delighted in putting diuretic pills in his coffee when it was mtyturn to take in his afternoon drink.
R6
R6
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- Lemon Half
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Re: Corporate Christmas Gifts
Rhyd6 wrote:I always hated the manager after that and delighted in putting diuretic pills in his coffee when it was mtyturn to take in his afternoon drink.
You are evil.
BJ
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- Lemon Slice
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Re: Corporate Christmas Gifts
Lootman wrote:The heyday of lunchtime drinking was the 1980's. I recall one particular lunchtime session circa 1986 when a bunch of us hit a pub in Aldgate around 12 noon, drank until it closed at 3 pm, then went to a curry house for vindaloo and lager, before returning to the office...
The Company I worked for at that time had a Software engineer that, a day after after one of those sessions, created a folder called 'pub' and all code written after any of those trips would go in there until he was sober. This was a result of him once losing oodles of code he'd been working on as a result of a particularly alcoholic lunch.
At the first Company I worked for everyone got a Christmas gift. We trundled down to Reception to find loads of turkeys lined up by size, literally a pecking order, and ours were, of course, at the very far end, away from those of the Sales Managers and their ilk.
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- Lemon Half
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Re: Corporate Christmas Gifts
AndyPandy wrote:
The Company I worked for at that time had a Software engineer that, a day after after one of those sessions, created a folder called 'pub' and all code written after any of those trips would go in there until he was sober. This was a result of him once losing oodles of code he'd been working on as a result of a particularly alcoholic lunch.
Sounds like a wise plan; you've got to be careful that you don't fall off the Ballmer peak
(https://xkcd.com/323/)
- sd
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- Lemon Half
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Re: Corporate Christmas Gifts
Rhyd6 wrote: I always hated the manager after that and delighted in putting diuretic pills in his coffee when it was mtyturn to take in his afternoon drink.
R6
Revenge is a dish best served cold
didds
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Re: Corporate Christmas Gifts
servodude wrote:Sounds like a wise plan; you've got to be careful that you don't fall off the Ballmer peak
I used to work with "two pints Pete", named thanks to his darts prowess that improved markedly during his second pint, then tailed off sharply again. Your graph reminded me. Happy days, until the pub replaced the dartboard with an electronic dart board machine, with plastic tipped darts. It was an abomination, we never stepped foot in there again. It's now a thai restaurant.
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- Lemon Half
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Re: Corporate Christmas Gifts
UncleIan wrote:I used to work with "two pints Pete", named thanks to his darts prowess that improved markedly during his second pint, then tailed off sharply again. Your graph reminded me. Happy days, until the pub replaced the dartboard with an electronic dart board machine, with plastic tipped darts.
Any Zummerzet skittles player will tell you that your aim improves after the fourth pint. Of zyder, which might be 10% alcohol or more. After that, it doesn't keep on getting better - you just think it does. The only person in the pub who needs to be reasonably sober is the sticker-upper who sets up the fallen pins, over and over and over again. Which is doubly ironic, because if anyone deserves a free pint or three, it's him, the poor sod. Don't ask me how I know.
Electronic dart boards sound like a solution in search of a problem. Except when I'm playing, that is. My chucking technique has been generously described as unique. I can clear a pub in forty seconds.
BJ
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- Lemon Quarter
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Re: Corporate Christmas Gifts
Rhyd6 wrote:I always hated the manager after that and delighted in putting diuretic pills in his coffee when it was mtyturn to take in his afternoon drink.
Not quite as drastic as the standard remedy for bottles-of-milk stealers in college: lacing a bottle with phenolphthalein (a standard acidity indicator from the Chemistry department)
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- Lemon Half
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Re: Corporate Christmas Gifts
bungeejumper wrote: The only person in the pub who needs to be reasonably sober is the sticker-upper who sets up the fallen pins, over and over and over again. Which is doubly ironic, because if anyone deserves a free pint or three, it's him, the poor sod. Don't ask me how I know.
BJ
but here in Wiltshire, the sticker upper gets pints bought for him/her by both teams post match. NOt in Zummerzet then?
didds
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Re: Corporate Christmas Gifts
UncleIan wrote:servodude wrote:Sounds like a wise plan; you've got to be careful that you don't fall off the Ballmer peak
I used to work with "two pints Pete", named thanks to his darts prowess that improved markedly during his second pint, then tailed off sharply again. Your graph reminded me. Happy days, until the pub replaced the dartboard with an electronic dart board machine, with plastic tipped darts. It was an abomination, we never stepped foot in there again. It's now a thai restaurant.
Motor skills fall off after about 2-3 pints for me also.
Specifically it peaks somewhere during the 3rd half litre of Norlands Guld; had it measured under "test conditions" when I worked in a medical lab in Sweden.
The motive was ostensibly to investigate whether Hans Gunnar Liljenwall was unfairly disqualified (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans-Gunnar_Liljenwall), but really that was decades before and I think it was just an excuse.
- sd
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- Lemon Quarter
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Re: Corporate Christmas Gifts
UncleIan wrote:I used to work with "two pints Pete", named thanks to his darts prowess that improved markedly during his second pint, then tailed off sharply again.
I used to be quite a good darts player, and played regularly at pub level. But I'd not played for years until about 5 years ago, when we were on holiday in France, The house had a dartboard, so we agreed to have a game.
I was really quite shocked at how bad I was. I could hardly hit the board, let alone a specific number.
At the time I just laughed it off, but I studiously avoided any other invitations until near the end of the holiday after a long and somewhat bibulous dinner. I'd `forgotten' that I could no longer play and actually played very well.
I mentioned this some time later to a doctor chum, and he said there was a perfectly logical explanation. Apparently, if you learn to do something while under the influence your body adjusts itself to take that into account. Virtually all of my dart playing had taken place under the influence, and consequently, in order to play well, I had to recreate the conditions that my arm muscles and reflexes were conditioned to.
This was apparently one of the reasons that the professional darts players used to consume pints while playing (or at least it was a convenient excuse for doing so!)
As I shall be vacating LF for the next couple of days a very happy CHristmas to all my fellow Fools.
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