Yesterday I sent a gift-card to the wonderful gentleman who was recruiting me for Amazon. Although I was interviewed twice and made it through two levels of phone screens I was not offered a position. This guy had spent a lot of time with me getting me prepped for the phone interviews, talking about Oracle in general and he turned me on to the Oracle Wait Interface book that enabled me to find the root-cause of the outages we had when we migrated the Production database from Texas to Washington. Our lead DBA architect was out of town on a family emergency that week so my being able to find the root-cause of the outages was a huge bump up in my confidence and also earned respect of my co-workers and manager. So I am really grateful for this guy and have wanted to send some kind of “thank you” for ages now. Christmas felt like the perfect time to express gratitude, so I got a gift-card and sent it off with a short note.