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PRESENTS

As the holiday season approaches, most of us are familiar with the office Secret Santa. I worked with a fairly grumpy and unenthusiastic group of folks and made the mistake of organizing a department Secret Santa with my work buddy in an effort to improve morale. We had a very good turnout considering the prevalent office attitude to festivities and general happiness, but there was one particular colleague who made his displeasure known in a unique way.

One of the reasons that he was so agitated was that hackers clearly now had his personal information because we had used an online Secret Santa generator to invite our colleagues to participate. In his mind, those friendly auto-generated invitation emails were evidently phishing scams that were placing him in mortal danger of identity theft.

In the few business days we gave our colleagues to RSVP, he circled past my co-organizer's desk on a daily basis to state that under no circumstances would he be participating or decide to participate in any Secret Santa in the future. We reassured him that participation was entirely optional. So, names were drawn amongst those who had RSVPed, and the very next day, our "participating under no circumstances" colleague showed up at my co-organizer's desk with a wrapped present for the gift exchange.

Needless to say, we were slightly confused as to how he had decided to participate given his disposition over the entire week, but also very confused as to whom this gift was intended for. Was it for one of us or perhaps an imaginary Secret Santa match? We may or may not have covertly unwrapped the gift to see what it was, then reallocated him to an appropriate recipient.

The moral of the story? Think twice before organizing a Secret Santa and never say never...under no circumstances!