Milestone in Your Career

Recently, a friend of mine reached his 5 year anniversary at his job. Because I haven't worked in a large corporate environment in several years, I'm completely ignorant when it comes to the inner-workings of these places, the little quirks that make them special. For instance, I know from talking to my friends in finance that when they reach big milestones at work, they receive things like $30,000 bonuses, and often those "milestones" include "starting work" or even just "December." Hahaha. I laugh to hide the pain.

Anyway this friend of mine does not happen to work in finance, but rather the glorious field of publishing. And while publishing can offer someone things like pride for bringing literature to the world, or an inner glow of knowing insider gossip about bigwigs' drinking binges, it's also tinged with the fact that you are bringing the public books on how to pet your cat and that no one outside publishing knows who the bigwigs are or cares about their car-theft days. Publishing also doesn't "pay so much" and, especially at the beginning, "bonus" can be a relative term.

So when his 5 year anniversary approached, he was given some choices. From a catalogue. I would now like to take you through a tour of what you too could have, if you worked for 5 years at this company. It helps to think of the experience as though you sold the most candy bars out of anyone in the 5th grade and you can now pick your prize. Or maybe you were on a plane and there was some in-flight minor disaster and to keep everyone in the cabin happy, you each get to choose something right out of SkyMall for your very own.

My friend didn't look too hard at this first page, because it is obviously For the Ladies. The 65-year-old ladies who have worked there 5 years.

Moving on, you can also cash in your skee-ball tickets for these lovely wallets, or some crystal to give away as a wedding gift. I kinda like the demitasse set. I have no idea what a demitasse set is for, but maybe coffee? Yes, google has confirmed. Five years apparently buys you some culture, too. Maybe I should stick around. Please note the candlesticks do not include the candles.

Of course, maybe culture's not really your thing anyway. Maybe you're more of a "let's go to Coney Island and sit on the beach with a coolerful of beers" type. But maybe you don't know if you're that type because you don't even have a cooler! Well, no one's going to work in publishing for five years and not have a cooler to drink beers out of at Coney Island. Maybe I spoke too soon and with too rigid a definition about "culture." There's also a clock radio here. In case you...don't have one. From the drug store. For $5.00.

The fishing rod's kinda nice, though, and hey, no one has a bad word to say about binoculars. They're just the kind of things that you either: a) use regularly and thus already own nice versions of, or b) don't really need.

What's most fun about this catalogue is it's complete lack of judgement about how old you might be or of what gender. Even if you are a time traveler from the year 1982 and you have some how fucked up your time machine so bad that you ended up at the tail end of a five year stint at at a publishing house, there are bonuses that will wow even you. A quaint 35mm camera (that uses film!), a genuine cd player for the cds, OR a boombox for if you still only have U2 on cassette tapes. And of course a digital personal organizer. I'm guessing...calculator feature!

They saved the best for last. Upon hearing there was a waffle maker I told my friend that that was definitely what he should get so that "every time you make waffles you can think, ahhh five years of my life well spent." But in the end, he went for the electric screwdriver.

Did you pick out your bonus?