Worst. Schwag. Ever.

Part of the fun of working for a Silicon Valley firm is all of the free stuff you get. I've been decently lucky so far to pick up a couple of t-shirts, a gym bag, and a couple of jackets with Yahoo! proudly emblazoned on them. A lot of people wear this stuff to work and some even make a hobby of collecting the stuff. There's even a website, called Valleyschwag, which is dedicated to allowing people to swap stuff from their company's for others. The name itself is a take-off of the tech gossip blog, Valleywag.

I know. This is nerd's paradise. Bear with me.

A few weeks ago was "National Customer Service Week" (did you somehow miss it?) and being part of the Y! Customer Care group, we had a lot of fun stuff happen. Breakfast one day, ice cream the next, and the week culminated with handouts of a super comfy new fleece that is modestly labeled with a Y! Customer Care logo on the front and a Y! 2006 on the back, which will enter heavy rotation for me once it starts to get a bit cooler here in SF. But we also received something this week that is beyond description. See the picture to the right here.

It's a pen! It's a lanyard! It's a globe! It's a back scratcher! It's a relay baton?! It's a lot of things combined into one that leaves the imagination running wild as to who or what could actually use this thing. Its hard to tell by the pic, but it's about 3x the width and 2x the length of an actual pen, which makes it really hard to hold, despite the handy black grip at the bottom. The globe does spin, which is handy... I guess. We all had a good chuckle about these thing-a-mo-bobs, as everyone was aware of how hideous they were, and went back to work shortly after they were distributed.

But I must say, a worse schwag gaffe came from my former company, the old US Airways. Times were tough for most of the time I was at the airline and beyond the travel benefits, freebies were hard to come by. Budgets were being slashed left and right, salaries were being cut, jobs were being eliminated, etc, so the corporation was hardly in a place to be able to give stuff away, and I think most of us who were left after all of the layoffs collectively understood that. I even started holding a pot-luck each Christmas at my house that became a 4-year tradition in my group.

But one year, a few days before Christmas, I came home from work and found a white box in front of my door. It was about 2 feet high and about 1.5 feet wide. There was no return address on it and naturally, I was curious as to what it was and who it could be from. I took it inside and quickly opened it. Inside, I found a giant cylindrical block of cheese, like in the pic here, with a small navy US Airways sticker on top of it. No card, no note, no anything other than a huge block of cheese. Um, okay?

At work the next day, people timidly started to talk about the mysterious block of cheese. Had it only been sent to a select group of people? Who had actually sent it? Had the company got a giant shipment of cheese that couldn't be used elsewhere, so they sent it to us? Like the current season of "Lost", way more questions were brought up than answers presented. Before long, emails started going around with "The Top 50 Things You Can Do with the Cheese", including things like doorstopper and giant hockey puck. If I had still had that list, I would post more, it was deliriously hilarious and provided some much needed laughs in the office, but I don't think that was the intent.

I suppose whoever had the idea of giving employees something for Christmas had his or her heart in the right place. The company had taken a lot of things away from employees over the previous years and the thought was genuine. But as they say, execution counts as well, and in this area as it did with lots of other things, the company couldn't have stumbled more. I mean, a 5 pound block of cheese? It ended up only engendering more ill will towards the company from an already disenfranchised employee group.

So as Yahoo! weathers a round of bad press about the missed earnings these past two quarters and continues to see the stock be hammered, I'm taking solace in some of my past experiences here. As ridiculous as the pen/lanyard/ who-the-hell-knows-what-it-is is, it was followed up with something most employees see as an actual "thank you" for all the contributions made to the company that actually engendered the goodwill that schwag is supposed to. The company tries to make a good environment for its employees, and I really appreciate it.

But if I come home in a few weeks and find a small white box on my doorstep, I reserve the right to change that opinion.