We have a nice party and a Santa drawing. I got three unique blank books in a canvas bag “cause I know you keep a diary.”
Evidently, not much. We had the holiday ‘event’ today where people were invited to bring in pot-luck if they wanted lunch. The employer gave is nothing. Some of us who had agreed to, had drawn names from a hat and bought each other gifts with a $25 limit.
Best Part? One of the coworkers who is supposed to be working with me and training me the ins and outs of year-end payroll adjustments kindly ‘invited me’ to go fetch her a second plate of food from another department (!). 1) No, I wasn’t going to go get food from there for myself. 2) No, I don’t know Any of the people who provided the pot-luck. 3) Yes, she was f-ing Serious.
Excuse You!? Have I ever asked you to run-fetch-me food/coffee/anything? Ever? No? So exactly what entitles you to not only tell me to run-fetch-you food, but food from people I don’t know and who haven’t asked me to share with them???
(For the record, no I didn’t steal food for her, so I can’t add cube-thief to my resume.) As it was my lunch hour, I took my coat and drove to a local shoppingmall. Happy Holidays indeed.
Note to self: need to find a used VCR version of ‘Working Girl’ and leave it on her desk Monday; preferably a broken one that can’t rewind past the very end.
Every year my company has a big dinner that is free, including two drink tickets. It’s held in January, though, because we’re a hotel/catering outfit and in December we’re too busy putting on everybody else’s parties.
This year, we got a little extra: everybody got a $100 Wal-Mart gift card with their Dec. 20th paycheck. Mind you, we have more than 100 employees, so this was a pretty healthy cash outlay.
While a Wal-Mart card might not sound especially cool, it was a godsend for those of us in the catering/convention department. A good portion of our pay comes from overtime and shares of the gratuities on the events we run. We also don’t have fixed 40-hour weeks - our hours are based on the events that are booked. We do a lot of Christmas parties in December, but these tend to be smallish, and we don’t have many conventions this time of year, so finances are kind of tight for us. This year, we were dealt a bit of a blow: the biggest party of the season got cancelled. The area’s largest fruit packing company has given a dinner & booze party for their employees every December, for a total of nearly a thousand people. This event was something we looked forward to, because it meant a very tidy gratuity on our paychecks. But that outfit called in November and cancelled, leaving us in the lurch.
So, I’d already gotten gifts for my young nieces, but I didn’t think I was going to be able to afford gifts for anybody else. Thanks to that gift card, I could. (And it was kind of funny when I headed for Wal-Mart after depositing my paycheck, and bumped into half of my coworkers spending their gift cards.)
We get a pretty good Christmas lunch in the week before Christmas. We get to leave at lunchtime on Christmas Eve. We get Christmas Day and Boxing Day off, although this isn’t really anything to do with my employer. They’re both public holidays. We get a half day on New Year’s Eve. And finally we’re all given one extra day’s leave, to be taken when we like, between Christmas day and Australia Day (26 Jan).
Wow, I feel like Charlie Brown in the Great Pumpkin special. “I got a rock.”
I get Christmas off, with pay.
We had a holiday potluck and, after the holidays, my department will have lunch out and a secret santa exchange. We pay for our own lunches. Last year, my secret santa got me a gift certificate to the salon where I get my hair cut, so that was awesome. Some of my coworkers distribute cards, but I’ve been so busy coming down with various illnesses and injuries that I wasn’t able to do that for people.
Wow, it’s impressive to hear what some employers do.
I work for the State of Ohio, so the employer doesn’t give me anything but the day off.
Our agency has had a holiday show every year since I’ve worked here (this is my 18th Christmas season here - wow!). I’ve managed to miss every year, but in the past it was a pretty long (1 1/2- 2 hours, I think) talent show. This year it was apparently only 1/2 an hour or so and had almost no performances.
In my department, we go out to lunch together to a nice restaurant. We have a fund that the group pays into every payday so that we’ll have money for cards, flowers, etc. for various occasions. The fund also covers part of everyone’s holiday lunch.
I buy presents for all of my direct reports and something small for those who don’t report to me (I’m the manager).
My boss got me a nice basket of snacky stuff and my boss’s boss is taking us to lunch in January (he got kind of distracted and forgot to schedule this till this week).
Heard this story on Marketplace yesterday about Wall Street firms reducing the lavishness of their parties.
GT