Our offices and workplaces are bedecked with delightful, colourful Christmas cards. It is the season of peace and goodwill and, ah em, the marketing opportunity of sending Christmas cards. Let's accept, with goodwill, that those two can cohabit.

In this season, a kind thought for those who don't normally receive kind thoughts is in order. And so, we think of the poor and the downcast and, after last weekend, the PDs. Or rather, the unfortunates who managed to dump some pretty important documents in the skip. These things happen, and there but for the grace of God goes everyone who has ever worked in an office.

I once lived in San Francisco and had the experience of finding out that some very important documents had been dumped, unknowingly, by the cleaners in an office where I was doing a job. It was just after Christmas. Once the awful horror of the fact of the dumping became known, there was no alternative but to enquire as to what happens to dumped office refuse once it leaves with the woebegone cleaners. It was held, not in a skip, but in a paper repackaging warehouse pending binding and baling for recycling. It was there, we were here. There was only one thing to do and that was to go and seek out the lost documents. All hands on deck.

The warehouse was huge. It contained loads and loads of useless office rubbish from the financial district of San Francisco.

We, genteel white collar office folks, were organised in shifts to go and sort through container upon container of crumpled, coffee-stained, garbled paper and plastic. It was put on a sort of conveyor belt and we sifted through all of it. Thankfully teabags weren't so common in that city, which calls itself The City. Nor were onions so common in sandwiches. Anyway, this being health-conscious California, we were supplied with rubber gloves to cope with half-eaten sandwiches. No sign of rats.

Oh, the rubbish! Oh, the Christmas rubbish! All those Christmas cards on their way to a sludgy reincarnation as cardboard, if I remember rightly, for the local Smurfit-owned Container Corporation of America. In some ways, the conveyor belt was like a weirdly warped library, where you'd find the most amazing things to read and just wish that page four of the memo could be found. We ended up going on a strange tour through office blocks along familiar streets now at Sansome Street, up one floor then another and another of the same building, and then suddenly shot over to Montgomery Street in a completely different building with different memos, reports and dramatis personae. Through its rubbish, we went vicariously zig-zagging through the financial district of San Francisco. It wasn't filthy (these were offices, you understand), just messy.

We came across an odd one or two of our documents. They had obviously been jumbled, and it slowly dawned that there was going to be no steady stream of our beloved box of papers. Gone forever. Words like "best efforts basis", "due diligence" and "insofar as practicable" welled up like waves that only make you seasick. Our efforts proved in vain.

So, PDs, been there, done that, sort of. It's a sickener. With the best goodwill in the world, I just hope that some of those ever-jeering jaw-jaws some day have to pay a visit to a Smurfit factory or scrape their way in desperation through a skip or two to rescue their reputation.

Back to those Christmas cards. Fair corporate Christmas cards, we weep to see you haste away so soon. Off you'll go for recycling, if you're lucky, come the New Year. Most modern offices have no attics to keep them in, as happens in a home or two I know. And yes, we can all be cynical and say that corporate cards are unable, by definition, to express love or unconditional goodwill. But then, even some personal Christmas cards have an element of hypocrisy and mere appearances to them. Who would dare personally, or which business would send none at all, deliberately, I mean, not through abject disorganisation (my plea bargain this year)?

They are tainted, they are commercial, but why not make the best of the adulterated expression of goodwill that is the corporate Christmas card?

Even now, with just a few more days of corporate Christmas left before real Christmas happens, we shouldn't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

Happy Christmas!