Christmas Meeting

I was lucky enough to miss the Christmas meeting this year, but The Eye very kindly typed up all the notes from the meeting. So when I turned up at work at the start of this week I got a document titled "Just a few reminders from the meeting". There are 31. 31 is not "a few", 31 is "a fucking lot". On top of this, many of these 31 points are actually several points cheekily squashed together. As an example I will reproduce my favourite (#4) verbatim:

4. Don't rush the sale, be careful the customer does not want to go home with the wrong books! Also the person closing at night wants to balance quickly and go home! Keep the counter tidy and the work areas, but still merchandise!
Wrapping may have to be done by the third person away from the counter until charity wrapping starts. Throw away as much as you can ie old posters etc. We are in control!

By my count, there are between 4 and 6 points in that one.

I could go through the thing and count how many points there actually are, but I think it would turn out to be rather like my experience in The House of Tassels*, so I am going to count the exclamation marks instead... there are 25.

And for a nice punchy finish, here is the little postscript that comes after point 31 (yes, it is all in caps):
IN THE WORDS OF THE ONLY GAY IN THE VILLAGE WHO HAD HIS FIRST CHRISTMAS WITH US LAST YEAR... THERE IS NO FIRST GEAR IT IS ALL THIRD AND FOURTH!

ABOVE ALL KEEP OUR SENSE OF HUMOUR, HAVE FUN, LOOK AFTER EACH OTHER AND REMEMBER THE DAILY MANTRA:

WE ARE IN CONTROL!


*Old next door neighbours of mine loved to tassel it up. I counted them all once and the number of 72 comes to mind but it may well have been more. Honestly, there were tassels on everything. Ornamental keys in ornamental doors with ornamental tassels hanging off their ornamental ends. Tassles on cushions, tassels on curtain sashes, tassels on the bloody dog. And if you couldn't put a tassel on it you could probably paint some fleur de lis on it so they did that instead.