{"id":22,"date":"2010-10-01T00:03:49","date_gmt":"2010-09-30T23:03:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/postgraduatum\/?p=22"},"modified":"2010-10-01T00:03:49","modified_gmt":"2010-09-30T23:03:49","slug":"joes-leaving-do","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/postgraduatum\/archives\/22","title":{"rendered":"Joes Leaving Do"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>One of the fantastic things about <a href=\"http:\/\/www.lsl.ecs.soton.ac.uk\/\">LSL<\/a> is the sense of community. Today we lost (to the voluntary severance program) the Web Designer for ECS. <a href=\"http:\/\/www.joeprice.co.uk\/\">Joe Price<\/a> is a fantastic chap, set up this blog for me, (fixed it when I broke it) and is generally an all round nice guy. We wish him success.<\/p>\n<p>In honour of the (5) years of service that Joe has giving LSL, the customary &#8220;Coffee and Cakes&#8221; event was put on. Whenever anyone is leaving the lab, a card is circulated in advance, with or without a whip-round envelope. People sign the card and optionally pop a pound or so in the envelope. A well-meaning associate is tasked with purchasing a gift. On a convenient day, the lab gathers in a pleasant public area, adjacent to the lab, known as the &#8220;Airport Lounge&#8221;. There the grateful recipient is informally toasted, presented with gift and card, everyone claps and we all eat cake. It&#8217;s a small break from the day, but it invokes a strong sense of community amongst those who value it.<\/p>\n<p>A publicly known birthday is also celebrated with a card, but culminates in a flashmob descending upon the aging recipient, singing &#8220;Happy Birthday&#8221; in various keys and with myriad tempos. The Birthday Girl\/Boy (delete as appropriate) makes a small speech, often no more than a squeaked &#8220;Thank you&#8221; and reads their card, taking care to exclaim on the thoughtfulness of the picture on the front. Everybody claps and laments the lack of cake.<\/p>\n<p>Such little demonstrations of community and care, (though described in a cynical tone by me; I&#8217;m tired, shoot me) are one of the wonderful things about being a part of LSL. There are many others I may expand on in other posts: the willingness to help one another, LSL lunch, the high quality banter, international diversity, student seminars, the Head of Group&#8217;s expertise in wines and his willingness to share&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>Joe&#8217;s leaving do today inspired me to share about the customs used to give him a good send off. All the best Joe!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>One of the fantastic things about LSL is the sense of community. Today we lost (to the voluntary severance program) the Web Designer for ECS. Joe Price is a fantastic chap, set up this blog for me, (fixed it when I broke it) and is generally an all round nice guy. We wish him success. [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":107,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-22","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/postgraduatum\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/postgraduatum\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/postgraduatum\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/postgraduatum\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/107"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/postgraduatum\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/postgraduatum\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":25,"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/postgraduatum\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22\/revisions\/25"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/postgraduatum\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/postgraduatum\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/postgraduatum\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}