anyone recieved any good ones yet? I just got sent a chicken.....

No, but on that subject, does anybody else get p'ed off to get the email from admin each year - 'please provide a list of all your contacts, title, address, email at client so we can send them Christmas cards'.So assuming I do that, and so do all of my team members, for all 30-50 of the client staff we have been in contact with this year. And this for every client over the last few years.What a pointless exercise to then synthesise all this information in order to discover a few key individuals are worthy of a card (or chicken).

All the senior clients I have been around over the christmas card sending period have their mail opened by an assistant and I can't ever recall seeing the client read any of them!

Anon - you may be missing the point of the exercise. They possibly don't give a hoot about sending your contacts Xmas cards! Instead, they may just want to collect a nice little contact list so that they can:a) keep in touch with your key contacts, should they one day choose to fire you or make you redundant.b) gain a better understanding of who you're in contact with, so that they can understand the implications of firing you or making you redundant one day (e.g. are they only admins, or are your contacts all directors).It's one of the oldest tricks in the book. Remember, your contacts are valuable! I personally would ignore any 'one firm' approach, and do my own thing. Bland corporate Xmas cards are meaningless anyway. And what do they do - send everybody the same card, with the same printed signatures on the inside? This activity sounds just like, how before a round of redundancies, there will suddenly be a project to get everybody listed with photos on the intranet. Often, the purpose of this is so that the senior guy who can't remember your name can point you out as one to get rid of.I may be being too cynical here... but think about it for a minute.

@ Cynic - Sad to say but I think you're spot on, it makes me shiver some of the depths our leaders will go to. Thanks so much for sharing it

Cynic - gosh you are right. How dare these people do things that mitigate the risk of people leaving the firm. Outrageous.

so as it stands I'm the only one with a chicken then? Cool!I also accept bottles of wine and complimentary choclates.....

Me - By that reasoning, I imagine you will be first in the queue to let HR know when you're thinking about moving on, regardless of whether you've actually started applying for other jobs, so that they will have plenty of time to plan in advance and take appropriate mitigating action?

Cynic - who oh why do people have to try to score points on here. Of course I am not going to tell them because that doesn't work for me. But I recognise that senior management have to do things that work for them. I just don't get myself whipped up into a frenzy about this stuff like many people on here.

CarolYou cannot spell chocolate. I think you should spend more time learning how to spell basic words rather than continually stuffing your face with junk and getting fat.

Stud - well said. It is so important that we get the spelling and grammar right on here. I can't believe that some people still think the content is the important thing - doh!

my keys got jammed up with chocolate

It would appear that the chocolate jammed the keys governing the use of upper case characters and full stops also.