Because he doesn’t want them.
When you act to keep people from something they want and you don’t, it’s rude. Doing it for money doesn’t make it less rude.
It’s like eating the last cookie when it’s a flavor you don’t like.
Or, similarly, when a coworker brings in some homemade cookies of a flavor you don’t like, taking one anyway and selling it in the cafeteria over your lunch hour. If you’d wanted to eat it, no one would have said a word if you took one, even if there weren’t enough for everyone. So if you’re allowed/entitled to take one, why do people care what you do with it? Because some things have social strings attached. I feel the donated tickets fall into this category.
Now, if your employer gave everyone gift bags containing cookies, and you chose to sell yours instead of eating them, I don’t think that’s wrong at all. I’m having a hard time articulating the difference between this and the former situation, but it comes down to the social differences in how we view things that come from our employer vs. things that come from other sources. From this thread, it’s clear that some people would view the chance to win the donated tickets as being in this category, a perk of your employment that is yours to do with as you see fit. Although I disagree, I think that’s a reasonable position to take. However, I think one should be realistic about the fact that many people aren’t going to share your view, and may view you negatively as a result, and take that into account.
This analogy is getting closer to the point and is probably about as close as we’re going to get. Some people have a sense of entitlement that overrides all else. Clearly there is no getting through to them. It’s called being considerate. You don’t have to be considerate but doing so makes your community a better place for everyone.
What about my real life NASCAR example where we were offered special passes that were not available to the general public?
This is good. You know, I think you guys may be right about this*, it just kind of bugs me that I can’t understand why.
Haj, in the NASCAR example, you would be taking from your fellow employees a chance of having something that they couldn’t get in any other way. So it would be wrong.
- I’d still do it if I really wanted to.
I think it’s tacky, but ultimately not a big deal.
I am surprised at the number of people who find this behavior acceptable. I hope that it is because the situation is associate with work, where money, quite correctly, is a defining element.
Frankly, entering the drawing just to sell the tickets is greedy.
Essentially I don’t want people to feel constrained or beholden in any way when I give them a gift. I’ve actually discussed this with friends and family members in the past, and the best gift-giving spirit I’ve been able to come up with is to give with no expectations whatsoever. If I found out that someone sold a gift I’d given them the only impulse I would feel (I hope) is that I should find something they’d like better if I got them a gift in the future. Moreover, if someone feels like thanking me, or tells me about their use of the gift that would be great…but I would be very upset if they behaved differently regarding the gift because they were pressured to do so by coworkers, particularly if the motives for that pressure were suspect.
I’m certainly not arguing against common courtesy, but I’m apparently doing a poor job of communicating that.
I think if you re-read my post #60, you’ll see that I separated discussions of “intent” from the “weaseling” regarding likelihood of donations, ease of conversion to cash, etc. And yes, now I wish I hadn’t used that term since it has distracted from the discussion at hand. And no, I don’t believe anything you had written was included in what I termed weaseling. Further, I must state that the substantial expressions of opinion regarding intent of the donor ARE reasonable explanations though I disagree with them mostly.
Here is the crux of our disagreement. I think that opting out of the drawing if I had no use for the tickets is a matter of common courtesy to my co-workers and you don’t.
Of course it was the insults (tacky, rude, etc.) that were flung, not the opinions. And I feel they are unjustified in the case suggested in the OP. That’s my opinion.
It most certainly is. And if you can determine the intentions of the person giving the gift you should make every every effort to respect those wishes. If you cannot, on the other hand, it would be tacky to impugn the character of your coworkers based on your assumptions about the intentions of the donor. There are some who donate with no intention other than to give a gift that someone might enjoy in any way they see fit. It would be especially tacky - perhaps even unethical - if you were making unfounded assumptions about the intentions of the donor as an excuse to increase your own chances of winning the gift.
This is an issue of discretion rather than ethics or morals. It makes no sense to keep all four Crock-pots even though you’ve been given (or won) them. You really ought to sell three of them and put the money to a higher use. In my opinion it doesn’t make sense to attend a game that doesn’t interest you much when you could sell the tickets and put the money to a higher use. If the intentions of the donor were to allow you to enjoy the gift in any way you liked, then this would not be tacky.
I agree with all of this IF AND ONLY IF your presumption about the intent of the donor is accurate. If it is not, then your judgment of others would be unfair.
I appreciate both your opinion and your explanation of it.
[QUOTE=jsgoddess]
Because he doesn’t want them. /QUOTE]
But…he DOES want them. He just doesn’t want to use them for attending the game. If he didn’t want them for any reason he wouldn’t bother entering the drawing.
Not exactly. I feel that if a person had no use for the tickets they wouldn’t bother entering the drawing. A person who wishes to sell the tickets DOES have a use for the ticket; that use is to sell them and put the money toward some more satisfying (and perhaps more worthwhile) pursuit.
You feel that the act of selling them them is, in and of itself, an affront to common courtesy (I think). In the absence of explicit wishes of the donor, I do not.
And my opinion is, that when a person asks others for their opinions, then it’s really not incumbent upon the peanut gallery to judge whether those opinions are justified or not. Who died and made you the arbiter of the justice of other people’s opinions?
There are a lot of “what do you think?” threads in IMHO. They are asking for – wait for it – honest opinions. Why on earth you would think my opinion, or anyone’s, was offered up for your judgment as to its weight or value is beyond me.
This is a compelling analogy.
And its key, I think, lies once again in the presumed intent of the donor. It is as hard for me to imagine someone baking cookies with anything other than the intent that the coworkers would eat them (rather than selling them on), as it is for others to imagine that I could donate tickets without the explicit intent (or frankly any concern whatsoever) that the winner would attend the game. But the fact remains, I have donated tickets, and I couldn’t care less what the recipient did with them, although I hope they enjoyed them one way or another.
Perhaps if there were as ready a market on ebay and other specialized web sites for home baked cookies in small batches as there is for tickets to sporting events I would make different assumptions about the intent of the donor of the cookies.
Wow.
I think you have read too much into my words.
What can I do to reassure you that your honest opinion and others’ are valued in and of themselves, absent any judgment from me?
Honestly? By not being quite so judgy about something as subjective as whether something is “tacky” or not. It is not consistent to say on the one hand that you value others’ honest opininons “in and of themselves” and then on the other hand decree that those opinions are “unjustified.” It’s not like something is ever demostrably not tacky, so I don’t know the point of trying to argue that people disagreeing with you are wrong. They’re not wrong; they just don’t agree with you.
Gosh, much of what I’ve been trying to communicate is that I feel others are being judgmental (tacky, rude, greedy, etc.) in a way that is not supportable, so I’ll certainly try not to do the same.
Thanks for your input, and have a great day.
I think this is pretty easy, and it comes down to that simple word - consideration. Some have argued that the intent of the donor isn’t clear. While that may be true, if you don’t know, it’s safest to assume that the intent was for a worker in the office to enjoy the game.
Now if the OP was desperate for cash to buy medicine for his ailing mother, the grab for cash is a little understandable. Outside of such a consideration, I echo those who see it as an example of greed.
If a co-worker offers cash for the tickets you win and you sell them, that’s fine. But entering the raffle solely for the ability to turn the tickets into cash is pretty low, IMO. And as InLucemEdita notes, you’d have to obfuscate the truth if you did sell them. If you need cash that bad, perhaps you need to look into overtime instead of a move that will make your co-workers think you’re a jerk.
Well, I’m not trying to shut you down or anything. It just seems to me that it’s not really up to you to decide whether other people’s opinions are supportable or not. Invitations to weigh in on matters of opinion are inherently judgmental; they invite judgmentalism, that’s pretty much the whole point. ISTM that you can make your own point without having your argument turn on whether you find other people’s opinions persuasive or not. Your opinion of the OP is of course completely relevant; your opinion of the value of other people’s opinions is much less so, IMO.
But this isn’t a gift between friends; it’s a business transaction between a supplier/customer and a company. The company is then passing this along to their employees for morale building. There are constraints all over this process. There’s a whole framework that informs this situation that is very different then giving gifts between friends. It’s all part of a well practiced game.