Christmas Party!

My company had a Christmas party today. I won't go into too much detail about the entire event -- let's just say, I don't think your company is this much fun. ;) I'm sorry, that was very mean of me.

My company gave each employee a $50 gift to spend on whatever we want, but there were rules.

(1) This thing we purchased could be something that we want, but do not need and would not otherwise buy.
(2) Oh yeah, and we had to spend all $50.
(3) We could not go buy The Washington Times and pocket the rest of the money to pay bills with.
(4) We were to go to the adjacent mall to do all of our shopping.
(5) We also had a little under an hour to do it in.

Another thing about this: we had to display our gifts to ourselves before the rest of the company. The viewers would then judge which person had the best gift. Now that these elements had been placed before the employees, we were told to go and have fun. :)

Do you know how hard that is? No, you really don't. I thought the same thing that practically every single one of you is thinking now: "$50? Easy! Everything I want but do not need and would not otherwise buy is at least that much!" The rest of you are thinking, "I don't want or need anything. How am I going to do this?" Most of you reading this know who I'm referring to. :)

David and I looked around the mall, wondering what to get, what to get. At first, I was going to be like my good friend Paul P., and get a nice pipe. The trouble with that is that I don't smoke. It would be strictly decorative. A nice touch for any faux-gentleman, no doubt! But then I would be tempted to toke it up on special occasions, like Christmas, Easter, All Saints, the Assumption, the Annunciation, etc. This would be bad, because the number of special occasions would continue to increase until it became every Sunday. As much as I like Drs. Marshner and Lloyd, I don't want their teeth. :) So I kept looking.

I walked around for a bit, and my eye caught a Radio Shack. TOYS!!! David looked at me like I was crazy (he's right!), and we went into the store. The first thing I thought of was to get one of those dinosaur toys that Radio Shack has made so famous. But then I saw that they had so much fun stuff there that the dinosaur option was one of many! I saw R/C planes, R/C helicopters, R/C boats, R/C cars, R/C trucks, R/C etc. You get the picture. I'm sure you do. The sales associate helping me pointed out a Red Camaro. I started drooling, of course, but it was over my limit. The car was on sale for $50, the necessary batteries were about $30. Thus, I ended up buying a Jeep, the necessary batteries, and spending about $50.50. BEAT THAT WORLD!!!

I took it back to the Christmas party. I wasn't sure what to expect. I figured there would be one or two toys, but the rest would be CD's, or funny posters, or -- you know, whatever. Instead, I found that I had been bested, hands down, no contest, etc. Curt, a new guy, bought the Apple iPillow!!! Darnitall!!! That's ok, I can accept defeat well. I'll just talk smack about him here. ;) Just kidding, Curt.

For the record, Curt is the man. He carried the floor with 16 votes. The second highest had three? I think? Maybe four. I doubt the hands ever reached five. SIXTEEN. You da man, Curt.

Throughout the rest of the party, my mind kept drifting back to that Camaro. My passions were getting the better of me. But I was above them. I would not succumb to my base desire ... the desire to own a new sleek R/C car, the likes of which I had never owned. 800 ft/sec, working lights, over 25" long, working shocks. Nope. Wasn't going to happen. Not this time. I was in control... until the end of the party. You know what it was? Andrew's red mug. The red mug made me dream of zooming the Camaro around, being a kid again. So I did it. I went out and bought the Camaro. I couldn't stop myself. The guys at Radio Shack were no doubt surprised to see me come back, especially considering that I was in a three-piece suit, but I think the sales associate knew that I would be back. He could probably tell by how much I had drooled that I would be back.

No, I didn't ACTUALLY drool...