Back to business ...

The holidays are over. Time to get down to business again. I returned to the office on Tuesday, went through the traditional hugging, kissing and wishing well and found that I had been robbed!

But let's not jump to conclusions. Our department manager was nice enough to present the whole team (70 people or so) with a box of MERCI chocolates. A nice and much appreciated gesture, despite the fact that the chocolates are of a mediocre industrial quality. But it’s the gesture that counts, isn’t it?

This year's card collection. A big' thank you' to all of you who sent me a present,
a card or email wishes. You're the best!

At first I wasn’t aware of the present, until my colleague P., who only joined the department last June, asked me about the box of chocolates that he had found in his desk drawer. Like me, he had taken the week off between Christmas and New Year and only returned on Tuesday. It took me some time to remember that we had had the same present last year. When I told him about it, he was really thrilled about the thoughtfulness of our department manager, a gesture he hadn’t experienced in his former department.

An hour later – I had been very busy reading and treating the 100 or so e-mails that had received during my absence – it dawned on me that I hadn’t found a similar box of chocolates in my desk drawer. What had I done wrong over the last year to deserve this? I decided to do some detective work to find out whether other colleagues had been deprived of chocolate too. It turned out that our department manager’s assistant had distributed the chocolates, leaving a box on the desk of those who were on vacation, including me. Apparently one my direct colleagues who is on vacation this week, had taken the initiative to put the boxes in the desk drawers of those who were absent, so that they wouldn’t disappear. I checked all of my drawers and found ... nothing.

At first I was really upset, but then I remembered that last year, my direct manager, who’s occupying the desk beside mine, had taken my box of chocolates to put it in her fridge at home, so that it wouldn’t go bad over the holidays. She might just have done the same thing this year. She’ll be back on Monday. I’m curious to find out whether that’s where my present went. If it doesn’t turn up on Monday, it means that I have been robbed! And then I will need to do some more detective work to find the culprit. Sherlock Holmes, watch out ... here I come!