I don’t remember who gave it to me, but I was cleaning out my desk and found I have a GC for $10 from Staples that expires in a week. What would be fun to get with it?
Two Rules:
The item can’t cost significantly more than $10. As in, $12 would be okay, $15 wouldn’t. Most especially putting it towards a color xerox copier is out.
Don’t be boring. Yes, everyone can use another couple of reams of paper, or a pack of pens, or file folders but those are rotten ‘gifts’, and this is a GC.
I want something different. Or nifty. Or clever. Or slightly out of the ordinary. In a word: FUN.
They’ve got a whole rack of crappy old CD-ROM titles for $10, some in buy-one-get-one-free pairs. Atari Classics, Cheap Knockoff Combat Flight Sim, the original Maxis Sim[thing] games, 1000 Fonts You Can Download For Free Off the Internet, that sort of thing.
Looking at the Staples website, they have calendars and planners. Maybe you can find a 2005 daily planner, if you use one?
Damn! I found a link to Awards/Plaques down at the bottom, and was gonna suggest you make yourself an outrageous-sounding Award Plaque to display, but those are a lot more than $10.00.
Or, you could pick out $10.00 worth of staples, and when the cashier says something, act suprised that they sell more than just staples.
browses around looking for any other suggestions
They’ve got frivolous-looking stationery, like this, which has balloons on it.
Gunslinger, not a bad suggestion. After all, we all know that nothing perks up the Quarterly Financial reports like doing them in ‘Bloody Horror’ or ‘Balloons’ or ‘Wingdings’, unless maybe it’s an artistic combo of all three. Peri, I’m afraid your suggestions have been disqualified… Both your links lead to requests for my zip code, and what could be more boring than that?
Tempting. Very tempting.
But I have no clay.
This has real possibilities. I can see myself wrapping myself in sheets of the stuff and stumping around the office like a modern day mummy. (It would have to be on casual dress Friday, I guess.)
Hmm. Would it pop each time I shifted in my seat? Not a complaint, that would be a feature. I could move around like a caterpillar on a hot plate every time a meeting got boring: Pop! Pop! POPPOPPOPPOPPOPPOP…
But your suggestion of fancy stationery led me to another discover: http://www.staples.com/Catalog/Browse/Sku.asp?PageType=1&Sku=46771Magnetic sheets! Five pages of it, ready to print and post! Refrigerator poetry? Hah! I could do cubicle ficlets! Entire short stories! Sexy stories! Erotic stories! My cube would become the most popular hangout in the building.
I think I’m almost set on this, but you all have until Tuesday morning to make a better suggestion.
A pack of medium point multi-colored gel pens. I just loooove gel pens.
And then I’d buy a box of Crayola classic broad tip markers. 20 years later and no one has created a better set of markers.
Oooh, I love pens, too. I’d get a box of Uni-Ball gel pens, medium tip, blue ink. I’d have to hide them (from my family), and just take out one at a time for myself.
I know, probably not “fun” enough for you, SBS, but that’s what I’d get.
We could easily set you up with an entire arsenal of paper ball, dart, and other fine missle shooters for your office.
First, we need rubberbands.
Then, a pen, or pens, for a barrel will be needed. Anything that will fit our ammo will work: it should have an easily removable end (like a screw-job) and it should probably have some way to easily anchor the rubber band. For ammo, I would recommend these. At $0.74/dozen, they are your best bet.
Most importantly, when it comes to building an armory out of office supplies, being juvenile and using your imagination is the key. Just the other day I created a pen shooter that functioned much like a blow-dart: it shot perfectly straight and stable across atleast 20 feet with a very good velocity. Too bad it got stuck in the ceiling.
Anyways, you could also build aluminum foil rockets, trebuchets, oangers, and basically whatever else you would want to use for office warfare.
You could also consider all this and the bubblewrap as well. At $4.99 a roll, you could easily afford the two with your allotted money. You could be the true office warrior, I say.
OOh, the last time I had one of those $10 certificates I bought a pack of Sharpie markers in cool colors. And the time before, I bought a big pack of colored pencils for designing quilts with (get graph paper, too!).
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