the corner office

Sheesh. A whole 3 days without blogging. You'd think I've been busy or something

Ronwen rented (and I ended up watching) Shallow Hal on DVD last night. Nice movie, happy ending, all is well with the world. Nice message. I identify, but let's be honest, the movie still needed someone like Gwynnie to sell it. Which is sad, but how things work, I guess.

I caught up a few outstanding phone calls last night. Interesting chat with my mom. She works for a large insurance company. Great profit sharing these people do. Thankfully they do pay bonuses to all staff, but each staff member also gets to choose a "gift", which is valued at around R500. The range of gifts to choose from includes a food processor, a DVD player, a mini-hifi system, a VCR, and a mini Weber braai (barbecue for the non-Sefricans). Of course, the first thing people do is start phoning around to really value these gifts, and discover that they're almost all discontinued and end-of-range products, probably gathering dust in a warehouse for a year or few! Who profits most from deals like that, I wonder... as my mom said, why not just give staff the cash? The gifts attract tax anyway (the company made a big thing of upping cash bonuses to offset the tax on the gift). Since my mom doesn't want or need any of these things, it boils down to her getting this gift and then flogging it to a local Cash Converters or someone for R250 to turn it into something useful. Multiply this sort of "loss" across all employees in the company and the waste must be astronomical. As someone pointed out, a good few employees probably don't even have electricity at home. Hope they enjoy their Weber braais.

Also phoned my aunt and uncle. How's this for stupid? My cousins qualify for an ancestral visa to the UK because their late grandmother was British. My aunt, however, does not qualify for an ancestral visa based on her own mother's nationality. To get an ancestral visa my aunt has had to track down birth certificates and whatnot for her grandparents who were born in the late 1800s and married circa 1907. How daft is that?

Apart from that, I've also had the good fortune to catch up with a few long lost friends this week. It's been really great catching up with friends I haven't spoken to in ages.

Now it's time to catch up with a few long-lost text books...