THE VISUALLY-IMPAIRED-FATHER-CHRISTMAS MACHINE

So, the Office Secret Santa is on. Oh joy, oh rapture...

"SECRET SANTA!! - Will be slightly different as it is all going to be ANONYMOUS so you will have no idea who you are buying for and the presents will be chosen at random. If you would like to be included in the Secret Santa please use the voting buttons attached. The cost will be £5.00 per person and will be given out on the 16th December"

Anonymous, eh? More of a Blind Santa than a secret one then. It occurred to me at first that we'd end up with a pile of generic boxes of chocolates, mini-stationery sets and those tiny bottles of wine people use for cooking. We may as well pass round a bowl of five pound notes on the 16th of December, I thought, rather than exchange generic gifts at the inevitably disappointing pudding stage of the Christmas Meal.

It never occurred to me that some people might see this as more of an imaginative chance to erm... up the ante. Today's scrum meeting ended with one person adding this little addendum to proceedings:

"So we had that email about the anonymous Secret Santa. Can I encourage everyone to join in please, because it will be a lot funnier if there are more of us in it. People tend to push the boundaries of HR when it's completely anonymous."

Anonymity seems to bring out the deviants. Wear a mask and you can get away with anything, it seems. What a metaphor that is.

"I'm not sure you're really selling it to me," said our Team Leader. Me neither, I thought.

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Now, it's at this point I have to make an apology. Yesterday, in my pompous waffling about convergence and divergence, I gave an example of a 'convergent' function which turned out to be a load of old baloney.

I said that a machine which halves an input and then adds that half to the input to give you a result would converge on a limit if you fed the output into the input - which is nonsense, of course! The machine would keep multiplying your money until the cows came home. In fact, if you put £100 in, you'd only have to run it 23 times and you would be a millionaire. I was trying to find a simple mathematical function which converged but they were all a little difficult to explain in a simple way.

However, if you had a machine which doubles the input, takes away a value of £1 and then divides the result by the original amount you fed into it, you would have a convergent machine I think, with a limit of £1. But it would be a nightmare to run. Plus if you start with £1 the best you can hope for is £1 back, which won't impress the cows at all when they do amble back to the cow shed.

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I guess I have a fiver rather than just £1, to multiply in this corporate Visually Impaired Father Christmas Machine then.

I'll think of something. And who knows what might come back?