Nik lives in Essex, UK and works in London as the editor of MacUser magazine. The posts and comments on this site do not necessarily reflect the views, opinions of values of his employers.
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A Christmasy day all round, really. Chocolate Christmas cakes in the office in the afternoon, then Canon’s Christmas Party, which I had to crash as my invite had gone astray down the back of a desk. It was out in Clerkenwell, in a pub-cum-club called Dust. They’d hired the top floor and positioned clipboard guards on the stairway.
Not a bad place, but a long was from base when it’s raining and every taxi in the city is already taken. We made it in the end, though, before we got too wet, and settled down with drinks by the lacklustre Christmas tree as the room slowly filled.
They stamped our hands on the way in to prove we could use the bar free of charge. Most PR dos, they don’t bother with this - you just get your drink and someone else takes care of the bill, but I suppose as there’s a risk the clipboard police might be evaded by some of the downstairs crowd they wanted a way to tell the hacks from the readers.
Anyhow, hand stamps are a shrewd move. You can’t use permanent ink, you see, or you’d have journalists walking around with a big Dust logo on their palms until they finally wore off at the end of the month. So, the only alternative is water-soluble, which means it washes off the first time you go to the loo.
This effectively caps the amount you can drink - the more you drink, the sooner you need to go to the loo and the sooner the stamp washes off. Net effect - you drink three or so, and then your logo is gone. Otherwise, you drink less to put off the toilets as long as you can, to keep the logo all night. Net effect - you drink three or so, and go home with a stamp on your hand.
Of course, you could just get re-stamped, or you could draw straws and nominate the one who picked the shortest to sit with their legs crossed all night and be the designated logo-keeper and drink-getter while everyone else is free to wee and wash their hands as often as they want.
Suddenly paying for stuff seems far less complicated.
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