Pleasant Surprise

I've spent a lot of time over the last several months negotiating a deal related to the new business I'm starting. Unfortunately I can't yet go into any details on the deal, suffice it to say that the company I was negotiating with had never done anything quite like what we wanted, so there were numerous issues that needed to be overcome before we could finally sign, which we did on Tuesday. Obviously after so many months of hammering out the details and going through several times when I thought we would never reach an agreement I was pretty happy to finally get it done.

At my old job (actually it's not quite old yet I'm still on salary until Monday, and then I become a consultant, but I'll go into that more in a future blog) it was against policy to accept gifts larger than $20 (I think that's the right price, could have been lower) from vendors. You can probably easily figure out why, they were worried that large gifts could end up working as a bribe or a kickback. Fortunately we have no such rules or qualms at my new business...

You may be wondering what the two paragraphs have in common, well today two iPod shuffles (one for me one for the CEO) arrived as gifts from the vendor in celebration of closing the deal. I'm definitely excited about it, though I'm not sure I'm the ideal recipient. Mostly I sit in front of a computer all day, and though I always have some music on, I can just play it from my computer rather than using an iPod. So what I may end up doing is using them as an incentive for some of the guys I'm working with (i.e. if you can finish X by the end of the month you'll get an iPod shuffle). We'll have to see, perhaps I should give it to one of my kids to enhance their coolness. Lord knows with me as a parent they can use all the help they can get.

All because I’m white and nerdy...