feigning joy and surprise at the gifts we despise....

I actually got a Christmas cracker joke today that made me laugh.  I know.  It took me a bit by surprise too.  When I was a student, I worked as a silver-service waiter in a hotel for £3 an hour one Christmas.  It was hard bloody work, but amongst my other responsibilities, my dad asked me to collect all of the cracker jokes I could find.  Why?  So he could paste them into a scrapbook and use them to "enhance" the script for the local Entertainment's Group panto.  Seriously? If they enhanced the script, how bad must it have been in the first place?  They were, without fail, awful.

Anyway.  Today's lunch.

The setup wasn't really very promising: it was my team's Christmas lunch, taking place in one of the seating areas in one of the cafes in my office.  The catering company cleared away the soft-seating, replaced it with some tables and put on some Christmassy music.  That was about the extent of it, to be honest, and the people on the desks just next door must have been driven mad over the last few days.  I've walked past the set up a few times over the last week or so, and it's always amused me to see people sitting with their teams wearing party hats as everyone around them went about their normal working day.

Still, it was only £10 for three courses, and it was an opportunity for the team to get together before we start breaking up for Christmas and to hand out the Secret Santa presents.  This year, we set the budget at £10, with the additional rule that you weren't allowed to buy any of the products that we sell.  It was a triumph: some of the gifts were really imaginative and a few were laugh-out-loud funny (a male body grooming kit, including nose trimmer?  Now that's funny....)

I got "Is It Just Me Or Is Everything Shit".  I actually already have it, but of course I kept that to myself and smiled and thanked secret Santa at the appropriate moment.  The person who bought that for me clearly knows me pretty well, it was thoughtful and it got a pretty good laugh. Funny, but I can't help but flick through it and realise how I clearly come across to people in my office.

The set-up might have been pretty cheap (the crackers must have cost about 5p each), but the food itself was actually surprisingly good, and we had a pretty good time.

The cracker joke that made me laugh?

Q: "What do you get for the man who has everything?"

A: "Antibiotics"

I like it.  A bit smutty. Implication of STDs (or is that just me?).  All the funnier for being slightly unexpected.

Cheap cracker (the gift was a plastic key with a magnifying glass on the end that you can wear as a pendant.  What's that all about?)  Great gag though.

I think that's my last turkey of the year too.  It's not that I don't like it, but you do get an awful lot of it at this time of year, eh?