[Northshield] Late Period Toys and a persona challenge from Merouda!

[Elyse Boucher]

A little site with very late period and gray-area
children's toys. I don't know if anyone has forwarded
this yet, so forgive me if this is redundant, but I
would love to see more period toys being played with
by children and adults alike. :-) 

http://museums.leics.gov.uk/collections-on-line/GetSingleGroup.do?groupKey=252


And I haven't stopped thinking of persona things, I've
just been too busy to write them all out. Today, I
want to challenge you to think of a way of expressing
employment perks!

"What!?" you may cry. Yep. Something that is true in
Tudor England, where my persona is based, is that
people who were employed were often paid with
"perquisites" in addition to money. If you look at
contracts of the era, you see things like "all the
stubs of candles" listed as a right of an office in a
household--the person holding that office, that job,
had the right to collect the burned down stubs and
re-use or sell them to, say, the chandlers for
recycling. These sorts of payments are called
"perquisites" and have come down to us in the modern
era as "perks."

Most of us have perquisites in our jobs, although you
might be hard pressed to think of them in some lines
of employment. But when I recall working as a
waitress, I got free food, and as "games girl" it was
free tickets to the amusement park, as a soldier it
was free travel on MAC flights, as a CNA it was free
training and occasional monetary or clothing gifts,
and on down the line. Even the crummiest of my jobs
offered *something.* 

So your challenge today is to think about your job and
ask yourself, "What do they give me that is useful or
fun or helpful that could be considered a perk, even
if it would not usually be thought of that way?" Then,
when you have it in your mind, share it with us here
in a period-netral way. :-) 

I'll start:

My job has a lot of small perks, but the thing I like
best (outside occasional gifts of just plain money!)
is the occasional opportunity to do something on the
company dime--esprit de corps and all that, you know.
Recently, the owner gave us all tickets to a baseball
game, and we went along to that quite happily :-). 

In period, I might have said "The Lady to whom I am
beholden brought my Lord Miguel and I to a fair, and
there we watched young men play at stoolball."

And there's the toy tie-in. ;-)

Anyway, it's your turn now! What does your job offer
you that is a reward or payment of some sort that
might be called a "perk?" And how might you describe
it as a "perquisite?"

I can't wait to see your answers! Please play!

Merouda


Modern: Elyse C. Boucher, West Allis, WI
SCA: Merouda Pendray, Caer Anterth Mawr, Northshield
Per pale sable and Or, a gryphon segreant counterny within an orle of feathers counterchanged. http://www.merouda.com

This is an listread address. I may not see your response for several days. Mail requiring more immediate attention should be directed to merouda at hotmail.com. If I don't answer, then hotmail's spam filters ate your message; please try again.


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