Boredworkers.com

This week, I’m sure many offices have held or will hold some form of mini office Christmas get together. Yesterday my company held theirs (company wide). Today, it was my department’s turn. We had planned on a simple lunch followed by a gift exchange. Obviously everyone left off buying gifts to the last minute. Personally, I’m not into the habit of giving gifts. But nonetheless, I found my present with WL two days prior.

For lunch, we called for Domino’s Pizza delivery. Four pizzas, bread-sticks, banana kaya deserts (yum), chicken wings, coca cola, and sprite. With Christmas (pop) songs playing in the background, we were all in a festive mood as we got our fingers dirty digging into the square cut pizzas (Yes, for some reason, they didn’t slice the pizzas the traditional way. Instead of 8ths, they cut it crosswise into small squares). Needless to say the the newly released White Christmas by SSFCP was part of the playlist.

Interestingly enough, my boss actually joined in on the festivities. My colleague observed that it was quite the coincidence that he didn’t already have a prior appointment with his wife. They usually do lunch together (initiated by him calling her and saying “Sweetheart, lunch in 10?”). Anyway, we polished off the food like piranhas, taking all of 15 minutes. Some of us were impatiently tapping their feet in anticipation of the unwrapping of gifts. I won’t say I wasn’t one of them. Haha.

No, the computer behind the presents was not part of the gift exchange.

Now there are many ways in which a gift exchange can happen. There’s the Secret Santa method in which each person draws a name of a colleague from a hat and will buy a gift for him/her. The recipient of course does not know who’s giving them the gift. The drawback of this is that you need to know who’s participating before hand. However, the nice thing about this is that it can be coupled with a wishlist. Then the person buying the gift can decide whether to buy the item that their beneficiary wants or something else. Makes for a more meaningful gift exchange.

A second alternative would be to gather all the gifts together, number them, and then do a lucky dip to see which gift you receive. Doing it this way makes things a little easier on the logistics. Additionally, there’s the added fun of not knowing what you’re going to get. It might be the gift you’ve always wanted or something entirely unexpected.

For our purpose, we chose to do the latter. Those who wanted to participate were to bring something worth between RM15 - RM20 (or more). It was up to the individual what they wanted to purchase for the pool. The presents were to remain anonymous, but being a small department, we already knew who was giving what. But that didn’t detract from the occasion though. Indeed, we had quite a bit of fun guessing what the present was as each person unwrapped their gift in turn. Shouts and laughter could probably be heard from 2 floors down. Throughout the draw, there were some gifts that we were very obviously trying to avoid (specifically, gift #4). As luck would have it, I drew that number…

Anyway, after all the gifts were unwrapped, we lined up for a photo finish. I suppose I should be getting back to work now. Cheers, and have a very merry Christmas.