Secret Santa
This is always the tense part of the office Christmas party for me. Others worry about getting drunk and dancing the can-can with their line manager’s handbag on their heads and their arms around two unwilling executives from Finance. I don’t mind all that, it’s just high spirits.
I do mind the Secret Santa. The rules are simple:
1. Pick a colleague’s name out of a hat.
2. Spend a fiver on some tat or a vaguely thoughtful present for them.
There are two camps. The first are the in-crowd, the ones who are chums with their colleagues, favoured with jokey presents because they’ll ‘get it’. These might include mankinis, christmas pudding nipple tassles, booze or perhaps a festive shotglass.
Then there are the others. The ‘I don’t have a clue what to get you, you don’t have a sense of humour, I don’t give a toss whether you like this present or find it funny, any old nonsense will do as long as it’s cheap enough; a generic dull gift that would do for any colleague of any age or gender.
Mine doesn’t bode well. It’s in a paper bag, not even wrapped and there’s a post-it on it with my name scrawled in hungover biro. Disappointment courses through me as I take it from ‘Santa’, our head of department dressed up for the occasion. God, all of this is so excruciating. More than a bonus, more than a good appraisal, the Secret Santa throws light on my real standing in the company. This is what I deduce:
1. Apparently I don’t have a personality.
2. Or a sense of humour.
3. I’ve been working in this office for 4 years but I’ve received a present that would do just as well for a temp who’s been here 5 minutes.
4. I forked out for a bottle of fizz – way over the £5 budget, more fool me – and I got a fluffy reindeer in exchange.
If I’m still here next year – and this incident has got me swearing to fire off my CV to recruiters through my hangover tomorrow, the reindeer is going straight back in to the sack. I’m even going to stick the same wrapping paper back on.
