"I didn’t know I was this geeky until I discovered the online world through my office’s 2400 baud modem back in ’93." The great Christmas hamper survey
Christmas hampers are quaint survivors of an age when workers were poor and sickly and employers provided food to strengthen the work force.
A lot of companies go for the ethereal these days, picking gifts of glass or wood items (made in Eastern Europe) that are very, very useless. I’ve had my share of two-part vases and oddly shaped napkin rings. Worse still were the tasteless tins of fruit and bags of ancient walnuts. My current employers go for booze.
Did you get a Christmas hamper (or other gift) from your employers? If so, what was in it?
To kick off with mine: Red, white and bubbly. Australian. Also, a Christmas bonus (which was tiny, since I’ve only been officially employed since Dec 1.)
Comments (9)
Just a box of chocolates. But it’s very good chocolate…
We got… er.. hang on… oh yeah
We got to have a job for another year. How generous of them.
The company I work for is quite good for this kind of thing, and very original. First year I worked here, I was gifted with a little Samsonite case, which I use quite often. Last year it was an Otazu necklace for the ladies, and a set of phones for the gentlemen, and this year everybody got a 256 MB mp3 player/radio/USB stick. Not bad, really :-]
Mine had 2 chocolate bars, 2 types of sugar, selfrising bakmeel, almonds, a vanilla stick, walnuts, a bottle of white wine and a jamie oliver cook book.
I think they want me to (learn to) cook.
My experience has been so varied. At Capitol Records, they used to give us a Christmas ham. Everyone made fun of it. It was really a useless thing for most young people working in a record company. One year, people organized a way to donate the hams to the needy, we actually had a van there and we’d take our hams and hand it straight over to the donation van; Capitol then stopped giving out the hams the following year. Go figure. When I worked at a law firm, the lawyers got huge Christmas bonuses (one year $5,000!). Then when I worked as a lawyer at a union, we got nothing at all. I’d be curious what others from the U.S. are used to.
One past employer gave food gift baskets each year and a happy holidays message from the ceo, in the form of a 3mb windows media file in the everyone’s mail box.
When I worked for a professor at the University of Utrecht, in addition to the glass vase picked out by the employers he would grumpily step into the room and hand me an envelope with 100 guilders.
Mine was a card with 120 euro is hard cash.
we got noothing, we had some candy ‘n stuff for “sinterklaas” but we’re still waiting for the xmas dinner invitation :)