And another one climbs aboard the blog bus—looks like PCMA now has a show blog for its January conference. Just a couple of posts so far. I can’t tell from looking at it if it’s an official PCMA blog, or if it’s the sponsor who is writing it, either independently of PCMA or in conjunction with them (there is a link to it from the PCMA site, so I’m guessing they have blessed it). Be curious to know who’s writing it.

It’s been a long week at the planning office. Folks are tired and restless waiting for the weekend to finally arrive. In your voicemail you hear this message:

“Hey, we would like to do a volunteer project as a social activity in conjunction with our annual meeting!”

“Can you come up with something by Monday?”

So begins David Clemmons’ article about adding volunteer activities to a meeting. It’s a good read for anyone who’s considering adding a service project to their event.

What is it with this sex-and-meetings trend this morning? I just ran across this article on Yahoo News about a poll that found some UK workers scheduling fake meetings on Friday afternoons so they could skip off to tryst with a significant other of some sort. From the article:

A survey of 167 companies revealed a growing trend of so-called “me me meetings,” out-of-office meetings used to cover a more personal encounter.

The poll, by Genesys Conferencing, showed 81 percent of office workers admitted arranging meetings to fit in with personal activities.

It also showed that over half of their colleagues were suspicious of the motives behind the meetings for which many of their workmates left the office.

While most said they scheduled a “me me meeting” to take off for an early start on the weekend, “the survey also showed Friday afternoons were the best for meeting lovers or to go shopping. Monday mornings were the most popular time for scheduling a meeting to mask looking after the children and Wednesdays were the preferred time for job interviews.”

Go figure.

Wooing labor got taken a little too literally, resulting in so-called “sex junkets” where corporate executives sent labor leaders to Rio to tour facilities, meet with local labor officials, and frolic with prostitutes, alleges a former Volkswagen manager in this article in the Detriot news.

Last July, a few weeks after he was fired by Volkswagen AG for alleged embezzlement, Klaus-Joachim Gebauer, a former midlevel manager in the company’s personnel department, began telling stories about the auto giant that many Germans found hard to believe. Now, as the company and German prosecutors buttress key elements of his account, Gebauer’s tale is rocking the world’s third-largest economy.

In January 1996, Gebauer says, VW sent a dozen of its top German labor leaders to Brazil for a tour of the company’s Sao Paulo facilities and meetings with local Brazilian union officials.

After finishing the official portion of the trip, Gebauer says he and the other men took a bus to Rio de Janeiro and checked into the Othon Palace, a high-rise hotel on the city’s famous Copacabana beach. They explored the shops, the nightlife and, Gebauer says, picked up prostitutes for trysts on the beach and back in their hotel rooms. In the morning, he says in an interview, Gebauer paid the women — and, using some phony receipts and some real ones, got his employer to reimburse him for the group’s expenses for the entire trip.

The Rio excursion was the first of what Gebauer says were dozens of “Lustreisen,” or pleasure trips, to exotic locations undertaken by VW worker representatives and paid for by the automaker over the following nine years.

You have to consider the source, of course—the guy is under investigation for embezzlement, after all—but it sounds like the German authorities are taking the allegations seriously.