World's Best Boss

Ben’s boss, Craig, is pretty much the greatest man alive, and I’m not just saying that because he’s been known to read this website.

Ben’s company Christmas party was last weekend, and this is how it all went down: all 30 employees and their spouses checked into our fancy hotel rooms and then met up for a delicious fish and filet mignon dinner at 7:00. After dinner and a fun game of Play-do sculptionary, Craig announced that in the morning we would be meeting in the lobby at 7:30 and having breakfast at Costco.

“Costco?” you might ask. “What’s so great about Costco breakfast? And duh, they don’t even open until 9:30.”

He then went on to explain that each employee would receive $250 for each year of service (with a cap at $1,500—it’s a young company) and that we would be given 20 minutes to spend it at Costco. The three people to come closest to their dollar amount without going over would receive a $1/hr raise, a $ .50/hr raise, and a $ .25/hr raise, respectively. Anyone who went over their dollar amount would have a number taken out of a hat and would have to return the item corresponding to that number on his or her receipt. No calculators were allowed.

After 20 minutes of running around Costco by ourselves and millions of pages of hotel paper filled with old-school math problems like this:


And more importantly, like this:

We went home with an Xbox 360, a game for the Xbox, a color laser printer, new sheets, some sour candy, and a $1/hr raise for being within $ .08 of our goal.