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Holiday Cheer in the Workplace?
inherent asks: "With the holiday's quickly approaching, the a
fternoon here at work has begun degrading into a large-scale
decorations-fest. Having recently graduated College, I'm used to
much more 'outlandish' decorations than those I see going up on cube
walls around me. What are some /.ers best and worst memories of
holiday cheer in the workplace?" I'm from the school of thought
that leaves the Christmas decorations for when it's closer to
Christmas rather than before Thanksgiving, but maybe that's
just me. But, for those of you who just can't wait to share the
cheer, this year...this one is for you.
Being a devoted Linux zealot, I was very excited to kick off the 12 days of Christmas last year to ESR's prediction that Microsoft would collapse in 6 months. It's been just over a year and it hasn't happened yet, so I'm sad. Oh well, maybe world domination will come next year. :(
I keep it in the bottom drawer of my file cabinet. Flasks store better than liter-bottles.
The chicks like to install physical decorations, but us geeks are satisfied with only a christmas theme desktop background on the computers.
I won't speak for everyone else but where I am everyone seems to want to toss this chear on me. I would rather happily keep on working and not notice the time of year.
I do not celibrate christmas or any other of the fun holidays during this time of year. I would rather them do away with them if possible.
What bugs me the most is everything everyone seems to do is all christmas related. Generic decorations I do not mind, but I would rather not be confronted with a picture of St. Nick at the work place.
Guess what I'm trying to say is decorate and celebrate if you must, because if no other reason we all need to lighten up and take a break, but make it generic so those of us that are a little disgruntled with this time of year are able to keep on working. Forced participation in the company or IT christmas parties... Yick!
The program isn't debugged until the last user is dead.
DMCA explicitly prevents cheering and or any such activity without the Strict permission of RIAA. Please refrain from typing, singing, kissing, sniffing, and wiping your ass with any music playing in the background, you must license those uses. Your mp3 player is illegal unless its RIAA approved and skips intentionally. All mp3's will now be only .NET enabled and will contain deliberate security flaws that must be allowed because if they were patced you may actually be able to have more than 1 MP3 on your computer at any one time. This is patently illegal and will be punished by repeated playing of music by a 4th grade marching band.
/. it's not what you do its how complex you can make it look.
Due to complaints that the phrase "Christmas Tree" was too religiously oppresive to some(One person, actually) we renamed it the "Holiday Bush."
Each year, we look forward to being called over the PA system to "come to the loby and decorate the bush!"
I have petitioned management to institute the celebration of Festivus .
I think that a corporate celebration of Festivus gives a brilliant opportunity for the traditional "Airing of grievances".
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
xsnow!
I've been running xsnow between Dec 1 and Jan 1 since about 1994. It's about the only true tradition I have.
Actually, I don't even like "fun" or "happiness." And so many people these days walk around with smiles on their faces, like it was coming back in style.
Please do not involve me in your "relationships" or "emotions." I'm here to work, and so are you.
(yes, it's sarcasm.)
My cube neighbor has laid this sick looking rope light all around the top of his cube. Buy, hey that cube panel top is also MY cube panel top.
The lights are alternately red, white and blue. About 6 bulbs of each color before rotating to the next. The rope light just looks dumpy. Not cheery. You know how Grandma keeps putting up the same decorations after 20 years not noticing that they look bad?
Every year, another co-worker threatens to display this set of plastic bells that play jingles when you bump them.
It was brutal the first year she displayed them. We convinced her to turn them off. Way worse than some low quality MIDI wavetable playback.
Now she just displays her inflatable (!) Xmas tree.
Jesus saves....And takes 1/2 damage.
People around here like to bring all sorts of food in for the whole group to snack on during the day. It ranges from Christmas themed cookies to cheese, crackers, cold cuts, & cake. That beats decorations anyday.
the good ground has been paved over by suicidal maniacs
Festivus has gotten entirely too commercial, dammit.
http://www.xmasresistance.org/
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
Yup. The typical pot-luck dinner. However someone, who was easily figured out, brought rum cake. We're not talking normal rum cake. This thing was completely saturated with rum. A slngle slice was almost the same as taking a shot.
Needless to say, there was much christmas cheer going on in the sysadmin and DBA staff. Other than some laughs, surprisingly, nothing was said.
When I was working at HBO, we held a "decorate your cubicle" contest. As I tend to be a bit obsessive-compulsive about competitions, I decided to really go to town on my cubicle.
:)
I picked up some scrap pieces of wood from the local lumber shop (basically gardening stakes) and nailed them together to create a simple inverted-V roof that sat on top of the cubicle walls.
I then covered the frame with the brown paper that you can wrap packages in (came from UPS) to make a roof, as well as the sides of the cubicle. With a little imagination, it looked like a little brown house.
After that, I used cotton along the edges to mimic the icing of a gingerbread house, and bought lots of lollipops and candy canes which I stuck on the outside.
In the end, it really did look remarkably like a Gingerbread cubicle.
One of my coworkers, once he saw it, replaced the little nametag on the outside (which read Peter Hamlen, Systems Analyst) with Esmerelda, Wicked Witch.
The best part was that Dec 28th was "Family Day" at HBO, so there was a steady stream of children coming onto the floor saying "I want to see the gingerbread house". Not a lot of work got done that day...
I just got paged for the fifth time. Someone else must want a 'snow flake screensaver' or holiday wallpaper installed.
I would gladly settle for a re-enactment of that memory.
to fill my cube doorway with mistletoe and attack that sexy guy in tech support
The comment previous is interesting.
Welcome to the free and wonderful mostly Judeo-Christian Western nation of the USA. Feel free to do what you like, but get ready to put up with "our" lame and stupid culture - AND FORGET ABOUT DOING WHAT THE ROMANS DO IN ROME, WE the people of the US DESERVE NO SUCH COUTRTESY.
We, the western Judeo Christians of the USA, are stupid sloths, haven't you heard? Being married, happy, with kids and not having your kids molested by pedophiles or being warped by religious extremists is a bad thing now - isn't it. If we aren't extremists socialist ultra-religious communists and just "regular," we must suck.
How about not having some kids that don't kids fuck excessively (or alternatively be a complete prude), abuse substances until it consumes their life (or alternatively be a prude that can't handle the sight of interesting substances).
Hey, most of here like Christmas. I like it. I hate religion, I don't like commercialism or what Christmas has been warped into, a commercial debt fest. But I like the songs, the trees, the smell of pine. And if you don't like, go start some GOD DAMN SEPARATIST commune you little shits and hide there so I don't have to put up with you politically correct asinine liberal socialist-extremists.
You reap the benefit of this great system then learn to TOLERATE what most of the progenitors of this great system like. I feel sick. We are the greatest nation, we have the best system. It is not perfect, like Winston Churchill said," Democracy is the worst form of government, except for every other form government."
Its interesting, I was reading the other day that most computer professionals are radically socialist in their viewpoints. Luckily, I'm not one of them. I'll be happy to abdicate my proclamation, "Welcome to the best place on earth, its not perfect, but make of it what you can." when someone else comes up with a better, more equitable and productive system. (This won't happen.)
And trickle down works. We aren't miserly evil people. When your economy tanks, everyone else's bites it 5 times harder. Yeah we have more than the average Joe oin the world by a gigantic margin, but it wouldn't piss anyone in the US off to engage in productive commerce with anyone. Roll back the clock 200 years and the USA was mostly a bunch of trees and some "separatist assholes" who had the BALLS TO COME AND TRY TO MAKE A BETTER SYSTEM. Its certainly not perfect, but it's the best.
Whiney socialist ultra liberal creeps, I'll be waiting along with a legion of other real Americans to preserve the values which makes us great.
And a Treason conviction to John Walker. 8 of the 12 Americans who went to Germany to fight with the Nazi's were executed for treason. Walker is a traitor.
I agree, forced participation sucks. But you know damn right well a green purple chinese alien would enjoy the time off of work. And so do you.