A few days a go I got to play “Santa” for my colleagues. I was to plan the yearly Christmas lunch in pleasant company with my partner in crime, Lasse.

I had so much fun planning it that I simply forgot that I my self had to participate in the “challenges”.

Well well well - or should I say Ho ho ho - here we went again on the yearly Christmas lunch with the colleagues. And once again we managed to survive - and this time literally speaking.

We met early to a shooting session. Real shooting with real guns and scores (I will not mention who actually won the battle and who didn't. It's simply not relevant for my story). We were under the expert supervision of Finn, Stanley & Erling the serious ‘Gunsters’ from DGI so we all survived the shooting ....only to try and kill ourselves with a 'Finish-sauna-theme' in DGI byens kurbad afterwards. “What is that?”, you might ask yourself, “Finish-sauna theme?!”

Well well well…(or ho ho ho): First you stand awful close to a lot of people wearing short bathrobes. Then you remove your own bathrobe and expose your winter-body wrapped in totally-out-of-date-swimwear and unfortunately the guy standing next to you is a “speedo-kind-of-guy”.

Then you crawl (the exact same and unpleasant way the guy’s speedoes crawl up his…) together in a 97 degrees sauna while a medicine-woman (probably born and raised in Rødovre) tells you “how to breathe and stay grounded”. Completely “cooked” you crawl out only to continue “cooking” in the steam bath a cross the floor. Here you receive nice smelling oil to rub on to your cellulites area (“keep it coming”, you smile to the medicine-woman, and she kindly gives you more of the wonder oil).

Finally you get to hit (or spank?) your colleagues with leaves (from Finland of course) and then you’ll be offered salty fish to swallow. I politely but firmly refused (my colleagues weren’t exactly singing “Catjes yeah yeah” while swallowing the little devils).

What a jolly way to be together! What a fun thing to do! Ho ho ho!

But we had great fun! It maybe was a bit humiliating and embarrassing but when the medicine-woman declared that….”please remember - before you continue your night out - that after being in this sauna treatment one beer will hit you like four!” we all seemed to replace the embarrassment with sweet dreams of the wine and beers we were soon to enjoy at Bibendum.

About one o’clock I felt the three bottles of red wine – times four – hit me like a train and hat to take off. Next day my head almost exploded in pain. That was the first punishment for forcing the others into finish-sauna theme. The second punishment came today when I saw the pictures.

If I was Santa that evening there is no doubt that Santa can be a monster: Look at that scary, scary person….uhh!

- Robbie Williams
Recently I have been working on creating promotion for one of our clients. And one of many steps in the process is to buy advertising space in several more or less well known magazines. My first time buying advertising space.. Piece of cake I believe. I am from Jutland – I am used to “different people - different prices” and expressions such as “you snooze you loose”.
It wasn’t quite as easy. It wasn’t the same as “Jallerupmarked”.Okay, at first there is a price. It’s sky-high and makes you believe that you’ve asked the price of the entire advertising space. In the world. “That’s the price, I’m afraid. We also have to make a living you know?”. Then you are shocked and confused and you try to rearrange the budget – but it’s a whole lot of rearrangement and the number on the last page still has to be the same.
Then you talk to your boss and he laughs at you and tell you “that’s the name of the game. You’ll have to push them down to the real price.” Oh, there’s a real price!? An authentic price… interesting! Then you call them again – slightly pissed. And suddenly they have a special offer for you because you are “a new costumer...calling so close to deadline…born in 1978 on a sunday…and stuff like that”. But it’s still not a fair price.
Then you spent a few days calling, mailing, play pretend, call back, pushing – fighting and squeezing the final offer out of your enemies. And then you win. And maybe so do they.
And you end up thinking if it is really worth the effort to have a person spending fulltime on battling costumers – and if his or hers time could be spent more reasonable on other things? And most likely your enemy thinks so too.

HC Andersen is walking the streets of Copenhagen again. Only now he is in an animated version. Today Guppyworks launched the computer game HCA and the creative director of Guppyworks, Per Rosendal visited “Go’ Morgen Danmark” this very morning to talk about the process and the game. Guppyworks have been developing the game of HC Andersens adventure life for the last 3 years and the costs is around 6 mill. DKr. What puzzled me is the fact that Per Rosendal & Co. haven’t been receiving any kind of financial support from the Ministry of Culture (Kulturministeriet) – because computer games aren’t considered culture. But why is that? I believe the computer game not only plays an increasing role in the entertainment industry and in the field of economics (exceeding the movie industry), it is also one of the most significant cultural contributors of our time. The language of new cultural media is dominated by the computer game. Am I wrong?
The fact that this particular game is about one of our times greatest pieces of fine culture has nothing to do with my wondering - it could have been a game of war - but it is worth mentioning.
What do you think? Do you consider yourself cultural when you play a computer game?

I have just returned from Italy...and wine and bruscetta miste and buon giorno...and wow!
I got married three weeks a go and have been on my honeymoon with my husband. My husband! And I am a wife! When I think of “a wife” I see someone who always keeps the house clean and wears cloths that matches and maybe has a couple of kids and a dog and a stationcar – parked in a garage. The car. Definitely not the story of my life. Am I even a grown-up?
It is kind of strange to pronounce each other as husband and wife and Mr and Mrs. It courses confusion and makes us look like two schizophrenics pretending to be normal people. Several times on our trip to Italy, when speaking to someone else than each other of course, sentences like “Im sure my boyf…the guy that was just here…ehh the tall one…ehh my husband will be here in any minute” or “yes hello this is Amanda Karlsson…I mean It's me... I’m the one who’s with the other one... you’ve been talking to on the phone. He is a guy. I know him well.”
It’s like we are being so focussed on our new "titles" that we forget our real names - that married people have different names and that they didn’t receive the name “husband” at birth.
“And you must be husband 2.456.366.398? The son of husband 1.164.952.761 and wife 1.163.496.469?"
In spite of the confusion about ourselves and our names (and why italian women aren't fat when they eat a liter of oil a day??) we had a great trip and it feels good to be married. And I am actually happy to be Mrs. and married and wife. Just as happy as I am to be Amanda.

It is infact a husband and a wife on that picture. And if it looks like the wife is running away she's not. She's just trying to figure out where her car is parked...?

A very good friend of mine is studying in Island these days and just came home to visit. She told me about the nature, the wild horses, the hot water, the very special light in the evening and how she is actually getting used to the beautiful view outside her window...

You can see more pictures here

I have just red the comment on my post on Lego. It was well hidden, Søren ;-)

I agree that it is a challenge to write in a language that everybody understands. You can never be sure that people read and understand what you "put out there" just the way you want it to be red and understood. That is a chance you will have to take when you communicate and you must be willing to take the possible heat afterwards – I’m prepared to do both ;-)

How far can you go? Well, I believe you know that when you are a part of a team and when you are a normally sane, commonsensical and reasonable person. Of course I would never go any further than my responsibility concerning STAGIS - and my responsibility as a human being - allows me to go. Which means that I would never write anything I felt could harm anyone in anyway. Nor do anything on purpose to damage our relations to clients, colleagues and other relations. That would be very cruel and also very, very stupid.
That is why you don't find anything specific about our meeting with Lego System a/s in my post. A meeting which by the way went fantastic and was both a pleasant and an educational experience. And that is also why you don't find any names on people who participated in the meeting, in my post.
What you do find is a description of my boss and I playing in the hall - because to us that is what Lego is about. Playing. And if anyone is exposed I believe it's us.

One of the wonderful things about blogging is that it is the "voice of a company". And it wouldn't be that if we had an editor, say for an instance if Nikolaj were editing our posts before saving them on our weblog.
If that was the case it wouldn´t be a corporate blog, would it?

Last monday Nikolaj and I went to a meeting in Billund with LEGO System A/S. I don’t know if any of you have visited the place – not “Legoland” but the “Headquarter”? It is possible to be mistaken about the two. When arriving you enter a large hall with a desk where it’s actually difficult to tell the receptionist from the lego-pirate standing in full size beside her. In the middle of the large hall you’ll find a huge sandbox – only with LEGO in it instead of sand. Beside the LEGO-pool small chairs for children are placed. One might just add: How many children visit LEGO System in a day? Right. So the pool must be for everyone – even grown-ups. We were a little early for our appointment so we sat down by the LEGO-pool and began to build. Another guy – also waiting in the hall – did not come around to join us. Instead he waited in the grown-up area, reading a paper. We decided to build the project we were to present at our meeting.

- Isn’t it just typical for our business? “Oh let’s tell it in colors. Let’s make it visual.”

But we actually thought it was a splendid idea – and we were pretty serious about it:

“Are you crazy!?! What kinds of colors are that you are mixing!?!” and… “You’ll have to secure that roof now!”

The person we were supposed to meet went out in the hall twice and walked straight by us, while we were trying to keep balance on our tiny chairs while almost reaching the throwing-LEGO-at –each-other-point. Why didn’t he look by the LEGO-pool? At last he found us and we followed him to a large room which looked like a giant showroom. And there we were talking about serious business with a very serious man surrounded by airplanes, robots and farms with chickens you could easily transform into ducks. Our “fine piece of work” build in splendid colors and with a top secure roof seemed a bit old fashioned among all the boxes with airplanes, and really didn’t seem to impress him at all.  He had exactly the look of a parent receiving a blue ashtray made of clay: It is…what is it?

After the meeting he gave me his card. It was yellow and had a yellow LEGO-pirate printed on it.

I went to the movies the other night and saw United 93 a highly recommendable piece of work directed by Paul Greengrass (The Bourne Supremacy 2004, Bloody Sunday 2002 and Theory of Flight back in 1998). The movie is about the flight united 93 that was hijacked by terrorist and later crashed near Shanksville, Pennsylvania when passengers foiled the terrorist plot. The movie tells the story of what happened in the hours before the attack and is reconstructed by phonecalls made by the passangers before the crash. No one survived. Yesterday it was five years since the World Trade Center was demolished by terrorist attack and several thousands were killed. I can only recommend you all to go see this movie. In remembrance of the passengers on the flight united 93 and of course in memory of all the people who died on September 11, 2001.
A friend of mine travelled home from New York on September 10, 2001.

I need to get a meeting with Bendt Bendtsen

Nothing fancy. Just a meeting. One hour should be enough to tell him about an extremely interesting project, which he must participate in - contribute to - and simply support!

Is there anybody out there who happens to know a short cut to Bendt? Then please let me know!

According to one of the new free-papers ("gratis-aviserne") have several more or less well-known personalities suggested how we should spend these extra “goodies” that Thor Pedersen seems to be in possesion of. One of them (also well-know for spending money and being awful good at it) was Kurt Thorsen, and I can only agree to what he suggested: “Use the money on the elders. On science and education and just make sure that our hearts and brains will shine of happiness!” And here comes the best part of what Kurt Thorsen said: One could also buy back the West Indies….but then again, we have ofcourse Bornholm!”
How would you spent the money? Would you give DSB Harry a raise - or just a helping hand on handling the train-traffic? Would you suggest helping the 3. world?
What to do. What to do...?