This Thanksgiving Brunch Was No Turkey

Midwestern University holiday socials are fun events. This past week, we had our Thanksgiving Brunch, an annual get-together that lets the Midwestern faculty and staff meet and greet the administration team, enjoy some good food, and maybe even win something in an entertaining raffle.

This was my first Thanksgiving Brunch, and the first thing I learned about it was that the Office of Communications is responsible for organizing and putting these holiday socials together. Our break room was filled nearly from floor to ceiling with raffle items for the better part of two weeks. In between our other jobs, we all took breaks to go back and prepare the prizes for the winners.

My job, it turns out, was to get all of the price tag stickers off of the packaging. Now, I am not a vengeful man by nature, and I'm not going to name names, but there are a couple of local businesses who are now on my Angry-Eyes List because of their perplexing and not-at-all-necessary practice of affixing price labels with what appeared to me to be the same adhesive that NASA uses to stick tiles onto the Space Shuttle. But that bit of passive-aggression was a small thing compared to my desire to contribute a small bit to the "raffle prize beautification effort." (Oh, and major props to Karen Mattox, whose rubber cement trick erased some of my more pathetic efforts at tag removal.)

But I digress.

The thing I love about my coworkers here in Communications is that everyone pitched in to help with such cheerful aplomb that it never felt like work - not even when we showed up the morning of the Brunch at 6:30am to help the facilities crew and caterers get things set up. It made me glad - again - that I'm working with such good folks.

I have to give a special shout-out to Janet Reiman, who planned the whole thing. She did a great job and deserved every plaudit she got (and she got quite a few of them). We're lucky to have her on staff.

The Thanksgiving Brunch itself went off without a hitch. The food was good and plentiful, the company was excellent, and the raffle was a great deal of fun. I have to confess, I may have embarrassed my coworkers when I ended up winning a pair of AMC movie tickets (those of you who were there, I was the guy that yelled, "DATE NIGHT! YEEEEEAHHHH!" at the top of my lungs).

I appreciated that the administration team were such good sports. They shook hands with four hundred faculty and staff and then hand-delivered nearly 300 raffle prizes... they only got to eat after everyone else had already left.

In the end, a good time was had by all and it was another occasion for all of us in attendance to reflect upon how lucky we really are - and how thankful we should be - to be working here at Midwestern University.