Didn’t the Bible liken ungratefulness to the sharpness of a serpent’s tooth? I suspect that those dealing with me and my ilk understand this well - particularly in the tricky matter of giving us corporate gifts.

After all, the gift can’t be too plush to suggest bribery, yet its purpose is positive brand awareness.

So what makes a gift transcend its usual destination: The rubbish bin, or ballast in a relative’s Christmas stocking? Here’s my 10 to remember:

1. Business card-sized magnifying glass (with integrated light). Score: 10/10: A gift from the African CDMA Forum whose representatives I met at the recent ITU Telecom Africa show in Cairo. Within 24 hours’ of landing home, it proved extremely useful in scanning my son’s hair for uninvited stowaways. A dose of Nitty Gritty did the rest of the job.

2. Armor-clad submarine cabling. Score 9/10. This mounted section of a trans-atlantic submarine cable from Cable & Wireless is a cherished possession. It’s a reminder of the company’s proud past, and a useful paperweight.

3. AT&T’s company history. Score 8/10: This nicely-produced booklet might become an eBay winner. That’s because I bullied various AT&T executives to autograph it, including outgoing CEO Ed Whitacre.

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Analysts like myself are Cassandras of the modern age; our predictions and insights are often not believed.

Cassandra’s gift of prophecy emerged after snakes in the employ of the god Apollo licked her ears clean so she could hear the future.

I have to rely on other methods.

Perhaps you expect me to say that the tools of my trade include C-level interactions, the crafting of S and J curves as well as time-series analysis of ARPU trends. And of course they do.

But in recent times, the analytical prism which also guides my assertions is a 52-year-old veteran of pan-European broadcasting - and where Abba launched its global career.

That’s right, it’s the Eurovision Song Contest.

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I’m planning a night at the Oscars. By my reckoning, it should happen around 2010.

A budding Hollywood star, Bridgit Mendler, has emerged in my family. At only 15, she’s won a leading role in The Clique, a film based on the popular teen novels of Lisi Harrison.

Exciting stuff in a bloodline whose only prior notoriety was the publication of the Massachusetts Conveyancers’ Handbook (With forms) in 1984.

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The rattle of jackhammers and traffic gridlock welcome any visitor to London after the ides of March.

The UK financial year is ending: Spend your budget by April 5 or expect a cut, particularly if you’re in public works.

This year, the thud of suitcases locking and money swooshing down the Thames join this noisome mix. London’s non-doms and investors are in startled exodus.

The cause: severe new UK tax laws. And they’re empoverishing our industry.

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A certain whiff from the boys’ locker room has invaded the air. It’s hard to think otherwise when telcos persist in talking up the physical endowment of their infrastructure.

Step up for a dose of Febreze: End users - and particularly enterprises - don’t care about core and access technicalities, how many football pitches your datacenter assets cover, or the number of petabytes transiting your next-generation network.

What they demand is proof on how such infrastructure supports them. But if juvenile posturings rule our industry we fail our customers and we lose money.

The danger signs are here. In a recent Yankee Group survey on managed IT and communications services, a shocking 25% of large European enterprises told us they’d taken outsourced network management services back in house. Third party applications management and desktop management suffered similar fates. The reason: Service providers failed to deliver on promised quality or cost savings.

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The environment is making me sick. It’s all the hype and hypocrisy surrounding green ICT. Just try finding a vendor today that isn’t jumping on the green bandwagon.

Environmental awareness is laudable, but let’s be brutally honest: The driving goal in this industry is generating filthy lucre for shareholders, not environmental altruism. If these aims genuinely coincide, that’s dumb luck in action.

The latest buzz is that fiber infrastructure is good for the environment. No question that fiber is sexy right now, as my colleague Benoît Felten can attest on his Fiberevolution blog. But green too? That jibes with what I recall when my job was to procure fiber assets across Europe.

Sitting in remote fields, I know of regeneration sites for DWDM gear that make certain farmers in Baden-Wirttemberg more money than a whole herd of Friesians.

By law, these regens are camouflaged to protect the migratory habits of various birds. Effectively, fiber infrastructure is seen as a direct threat to natural roosting patterns. Shall we also talk about the environmental impact of running power and installing battery backup to such distant locations?

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Perhaps it’s the influence of Lent, but I’m filled with the spirit of penitence. And in totting up my transgressions, it struck me that it’s hard not to sin in the converging industries of telecoms, media and IT - either personally, or professionally.

Clap me in irons, but I’m a Wifi piggybacker, shameless in the theft of bandwidth from those with unguarded networks. And in the bad old days before VOIP, I happily used callback services on my travels to reduce telephony costs.

In the late 1990s, the pan-European operator for which I then worked eagerly monetized bandwidth swaps with its peers. It made our balance sheet look good, and our highly-paid accountants advocated it. We also weren’t shy in refiling voice traffic via various island-based operators with favorable onward settlement rates.

Of course, there’s a difference between sins of omission, and sins of commission. But the problem is that what’s defined as a good, bad or just plain iffy can radically change in fluid industry environments.

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Heard the one about beer and nappies? It’s a piece of data warehousing folklore that alludes to the power of correlating data to uncover buying preferences and attitudes.

I’d like to believe that it’s smart to place beer next to baby products to lure men out shopping for the wife. But it’s rubbish, like much electronic information held about groups of consumers, employees and, for that matter, me.

My learned colleagues Daniel Taylor and Brian Partridge are getting all het up about who’s going to make pots of money out of rich subscriber data. They’re assuming of course that this data is accurate, manipulable and freely available to the diversity of companies vying to monetize it.

All of this I contend.

Living in Europe, where memories cast long shadows, I’ll stress that data privacy remains extremely pertinent to the political agenda. And whatever technical capabilities are on tap for global advertising mavens, it won’t be an easy ride to deploy them here.

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I’ve always liked being a girl. You live longer and can blub freely at the Sound of Music. But the industry in which I work remains male dominated. And that demographic distorts how the industry views its innovations.

Take presence, a core component of unified communications (UC). To my mind, Susie Orbach needs to quit her riff on fat: Presence is a feminist issue.

I recently spoke at the U.K. Communications Management Association’s annual conference. In a two-day span, no less than 8 presentations advocating presence were made. I’ll single out John Mann, director of the Innovative Communications Alliance at Nortel EMEA. His live demonstration of presence was articulate, persuasive and technically flawless.

This went down awfully well. I looked across the sea of dark suits in the audience. Of course they love it, I thought, they’re (nearly) all men. It’s in their genes.

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Is it just me, or has the Blackberry gone chav? The thought struck me today as the nanny arrived, clutching a spanking new model.

Of course, I don’t mean to imply that she’s a chav. She’s a nice girl from Poland with tidy manners.

But somehow, I couldn’t see how she could afford to own a Blackberry (not that I’m a skinflint employer). Or rather, that she’d prioritize its ownership over a DKNY hoodie or whatever designer frippery you buy when you’re still in your 20s. Unless, of course, the Blackberry has become a real object of desire for this demographic.

It would have been a good question to ask Robin Bienfait, CIO of RIM when I met her recently. After all, here’s a woman who holsters not one but two Blackberries onto her designer handbag. See photo I snapped below: they travel in pairs!

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