The latest in gifts – living on the edge!

What you need to know:

  • Change: Giving gifts has changed significantly. It is no longer the routine golf club; people are getting more adventurous.
  • As with everything else, the devil is in the detail and donors are advised to study terms and conditions of their gifts.

I have a friend who is a “petrolhead” — meaning he loves fast cars — and when he retired, his co-workers bought him a day at Silverstone race track driving high-performance automobiles.

Wouldn’t be for me, but I guess it beats the traditional gift clock, gold watch, golf clubs, fishing rod or beer tankard, or perhaps these days, a Kindle or a new cell phone.

Over the past 20 years, an industry has built up marketing “experiences” for an unusual, and often scary, day out.

Retired school secretary Barbara Watson celebrated her 70th birthday by wing-walking on a biplane. “It was like being up in heaven,” she said. “The only thing that wasn’t nice was the cold air up my nose.”

Standing on an airplane wing in flight is only the latest daredevil act Barbara has taken on during her retirement. Others include piloting a plane, abseiling down a cliff, walking round the 192-metre high edge of the Sky Tower in Auckland, New Zealand, and sky-diving.

The variety of experiences on sale to mark birthdays, weddings or retirements is now huge, ranging from a £10 (Sh1,475) voucher for treatment at a luxury spa to golf and tennis lessons and the more extreme experiences such as Barbara’s and my racing friend’s.

As with everything else, the devil is in the detail and donors are advised to study terms and conditions of their gifts so that they know exactly what the recipient is going to get and if there are insurance restrictions.

Laura Whitcombe of Moneywise magazine said: “If you are going to be racing supercars, find how long you will be driving and which vehicles are involved.”

Other experiences, such as hot-air ballooning, can depend on the weather and may result in delays. Many gift vouchers are valid for only nine or 10 months.

Most important for the gift-giver is to ensure that the lucky recipient actually does want to go wing-walking, sky-diving or motor racing and will not collapse in horror on receiving the voucher.

None of the caveats above deters Barbara, who next plans a spot of go-karting.

Her husband Carl makes only one stipulation: He does not have to do it himself. He takes photos and keeps his feet firmly on the ground.

***

Many office workers these days are asked to wear name badges, but Lucy Kellaway, writing for the BBC, suggests next time you see one, look at it closely. It might actually be a sensor telling the employer who the wearer is talking to, for how long and the tone of voice.

Such devices are very cheap and the information collected is almost certainly too crude to offer much help now, but the sensors will certainly improve technologically and companies are taking note.

So Big Brother invades the workplace! Sinister! Well maybe not.

In most offices, a raft of techniques, both cumbersome and time-consuming, are used to assess a worker’s performance, including appraisal interviews, superiors’ subjective judgements (not always unbiased), “competency matrices,” and psychometric testing.

But a study by a university research team concluded that these methods are so ineffective that companies might as well promote people at random.

On the other hand, if everyone knows he or she is being monitored and understands why, would this not be fairer than the boss relying on comments provided by the bullies and sneaks on his staff, people who have probably already made their minds up about a worker, based on not much evidence at all?

Financial columnist and author Kellaway wrote that if sensors were accepted with due safeguards, “office life would become more transparent and less political and managers would be freed from having to play policeman all day, allowing them to get on with the more important role of helping people to do a better job.”

***

War of the Sexes, Chapter 2,954: Impatient customer knocks on phone booth door: “Excuse me, you have been holding the phone for 25 minutes and you haven’t spoken a word.” Man inside: “I’m talking to my wife.”

If a wife wants her husband’s attention, she just has to look sad and uncomfortable. If a husband wants his wife’s attention, he just has to look happy and comfortable.

Listening to your wife is like reading the terms and conditions of a website. You understand nothing but still click on “I AGREE.”

“My wife’s female intuition is so highly developed she knows I’m wrong before I even open my mouth.”

***

Teacher: “In Greek mythology there is a creature that is half-animal and half-human. What is its name?” Little Johnny: “Buffalo Bill.”

A mother was looking at chickens in the butcher’s shop but could not find one big enough for her family. “Do these chickens get any bigger?” she asked. “No, madam, they’re dead already.”