Holidays are upon us I don't know about you (well, yes, I do) but I tend to buy a lot of crap from Amazon for gifts - especially during the super annoyingly crowdy jeebus holiday season. The happyrobot website (the one you are reading now (see, I know stuff about you)) has one of them spankin' fun Amazon Associates accounts where we get a tiny percentage of any sales that we drive (rrrrrrrrrrrr) from our site.
The nice thing is that even just using that goofy 'search Amazon' box on the front page somehow will help count any purchases you make towards our account.
Oh, so what does this all mean in the end? Well, what it means is that the amazon money I receive I then use to buy stuff for robot staffers who have been nice, and well, even naughty. Even if you are a robot staffer, use the Amazon box - that 16 cents I get from your 5000$ purchase goes into the pot so I can mail out goofy gifts.
There you go. If you are shopping on Amazon, come in there via the robot. Doesn't cost you anything (except having to come to the robot website) and it rewards us fractions of dollars in robot staff gift buying power!
Favorite work thing - Part 38421 The woman near me who when leaving messages on someone's voicemail takes full advantage of the "If you are satisfied with your message press 1, if you want to re-record press 2" feature.
"Hey Bob, I was calling you about the ummm... hold on"
"Bob, Hi. Yes, I was wondering if you had a chance to look over the reports I left you. I need to get those, um...."
"Bob. Those reports I left you, have you had a chance to look them over?"