CHRISTMAS BONUS, 2010 STYLE

Our coupons were for 25 percent off any purchase made between Dec. 1 and Dec. 6.

 

Never got a Christmas bonus anywhere I've worked.

The closest I can come to a Christmas bonus was when the manager of the previous call center I worked for gave me a $50 gift card to a local mall (a very large mall, actually). Besides that, the woman who was my boss when I was a student worker at my community college's library during my freshman year gave me $5 cash in a Christmas card.

The publisher at my previous shop bought me a box of already stale cookies.

 

One previous employer gave us clothing some years (clothing they received for free, BTW), and threw in a $100 mall gift certificate one year that I used to buy my first cell phone (1997).

I never expect anything extra. My employers pay me, let me keep my job, why should I get a bonus because it is Christmas?

 

SpeedTchr ... I feel the same way. I am so thankful to have a job, much less one that I love from the bottom of my heart.

Merry Christmas, to you and all.

holy bull

 

How many employees hanged themselves shortly after?

 

This man agrees:

 

I had an editor who said he got a small crate of oranges and a picture of the newspaper owner in front of his car collection as a bonus.

 

Careful, it's a trap. Don't open that jelly package! It's just a trick from the Star Whackers.

 

I worked at a Scripps paper for 12 years. Never got a monetary bonus, and their "bonus" gifts were suspicious. I missed out on the best one, though (blue font! BLUE FONT!) A few years before I signed on, the staff was given robes. Ugly-ass robes with the paper logo on it that were about as thin as a sheet of paper. Probably cost the paper about 50 cents each.

OTOH, the last six years before the paper folded, I was in charge of the clerk staff. I always gave them (3, then 2 for the last couple of years) $100 out of my own pocket. My thought: These people spend 11.5 months out of the year getting absolutely shit on, and we can't do better than a robe? Or a glass vase with the paper logo on it that probably cost $5? C'mon...

 

In more than a decade, I've never received a bonus. The year one former company gave them out, I'd quit weeks before. C'est ca.

 

I recall a couple holiday bonuses earlier in my career, in the mid-1990s, when I worked for weekly newspaper chains. At the time, I didn't think $50 was so hot, but it's been crickets since then.

However, there have been some fun holiday parties over the years ... some thrown by the publisher/owner, others organized by the newsroom. I'm grateful for all of them, especially to distract us from the heavy workload at a newspaper during the Christmas season.

And I miss the crate of citrus fruit my boss at a weekly paper in the U.P. used to give me each year. Seriously, it was a huge box filled with grapefruit, oranges, tangelos. Great stuff.

 

Never got an actual bonus. My old shop had a holiday party one year (well, I only went one year) and they entered us in a gift raffle. I won a massager. Our publisher won the top prize, a DVD player.