I had a pretty long day yesterday so I just now approved some of the track-backs and comments that were caught in my spam folder yesterday morning. They should be showing up properly fairly soon.
We had our annual ‘Santa’s Sleigh’ yesterday for the children of our employees. It’s always been a pretty cool thing which we do but it has evolved over the last couple of years to become a party and even the adults show up now.
What we do is to get a list of all them employees children and their ages. What we used to do is rent an RV and then the division managers and area vice president would make three stops and the kids got their picture taken with Santa and got a gift. Nothing major. With a ton of kids we usually hit Big Lots or something like that because normally it’s a couple of hundred gifts we have to get and we do have a budget we have to keep.
Over the last couple of years it has been turned over to the Division Manager. This year we blocked off the back of one of our parking lots and had a local company come out with the air walk things, popcorn, snow cones, we grilled hot dogs and had other refreshments and snacks. We got a hold of the company RV with our logo and actually hired a Santa instead of one of us trying to pass ourselves off. It was pretty cool and lasted about three hours.
The girls always enjoy it, as did the Marine when he was young. We have many pictures from Santa’s sleigh with all three kids. I suppose I need to scan them at some point.
Although I am off today we have a mandatory holiday meeting I have to attend, which is one of the reasons I am off. I changed my manager’s schedules so that they were all working as I didn’t want to give them any excuse to not be there on time this afternoon. I won’t hear anything new but have to attend anyway. It sucks because I only have one more day off between now and Christmas and that is next Friday. The Marine will arrive home next week as well. I have to pick him up from the Greyhound station next Friday morning.
Next week we have our company Christmas party in Anniston, Alabama for all of the managers and their spouses or girlfriends/boyfriends. It is usually pretty nice. There has only been one that turned out bogus and that was in 2003. My AVP rented a meeting room and had it catered. It ended up more like a meeting than a holiday get-together and there were so many complaints that we have had it at a restaurant each year since then. The manager’s are used to bullshit like that but all of our spouses said they wouldn’t be back if we were going to continue having it there.