My ex-wife used to work at a very high end retirement community. The food they made for the seniors was excellent and for what they were paying, they should have expected no less. For years, employees would get free lunch in the dining room after the seniors were done. Free lunch, great food. Of course, that wasn’t good enough. People bitched and moaned about various, trivial aspects of it so much that the Director finally said, “fuck it” and cancelled the program.
A good friend and former coworker of mine loves to cook, and one time she decided to bring dinner for the entire office – big serving pans of homemade lasagna. One of the women in our office picked up an entire pan (about 10 inches by 15 inches) and announced that she was bringing it home with her. My friend, not being someone to let people push her around, took it back before the woman got two steps away from the serving table.
It’s a shame when one or two jerks has to ruin something for everyone else. For what it’s worth, Triskadecamus, I think the roses were a lovely gesture on your part.
Hey, I put it in the pit, so go for it.
The actual wording was “the ladies who work or volunteer on (building name).” I thought it prudent to not mention the name here. The we was editorial, and deliberately unspecific.
The majority of both employees and managers are women.
I am not a workplace. I am just a old fart with a penchant for odball romantic gestures.
I hand out flags. Or more accurately, I leave a pencil box full of small flags in the lobby.
A rose is not a proposal of marriage, nor even a come-on. People in the US exchange Valentine’s that are sold in boxes of a hundred. This is a “deeply personal, meaningful expression of individual love?”
I am not the boss.
After twenty seven years, the people who work with me are my closest circle of acquaintences. Whenever I am not whining about some perceived shortcoming in their collective personalities, I do love them.
Tris
“The road to truth is long, and lined the entire way with annoying bastards.” ~ Alexander Jablokov ~
Ah, office pigs. The scourge of the workplace.
At my office we have “cake day” once a month. I’ve seen people take home stuff “for the kids” in total disregard of people who hadn’t even gotten their share yet. No matter how much is left over at the end of the day, it will be gone by morning.
We also have an unwritten rule that things can be left on one of the kitchen tables “for free”. People will sometimes bring in things like doughnuts, cookies, candy etc. One day a co-worker heated up his lunch, went to the restroom to wash his hands, and by the time he returned someone had eaten the whole thing! Now tell me, is it that hard to distinguish food meant to be eaten by everyone from someone’s goddamn freshly microwaved lunch?
Holy Fuck!
I used to work in a factory where I was known for my cake decorating skills; I was always being roped into making cakes for baby showers, retirement parties, etc. When Boss’s Day came up we had a potluck dinner and I was asked to make dessert. I made a HUGE decorated sheetcake, more than enough to feed the fourty people in my department. I even had to go out and buy a special pan in order to make it, since I didn’t have any that were big enough.
The boss announced he wanted his wife to see it, and he took the whole thing home. No one else got dessert.
<cancels plans to bring cookies into work next week…>
Christ on a cracker–this thread is horrid (well, it’s about horrid people acting badly).
I’m so glad I work in an incredibly stressful environment --at least the staff doen’t act Machievellian like these prizes do!
I head the Teacher Appreciation commitee and am Veep of PTA at our school, and everytime we do something for the teachers, we have to split it up. There are 5 lunchs, and if we put everything out at once, it would be gone by the first or midway through the second.
I chalk it up to people just being people, or greedy whorebags, depending on my mood.
I work at a video game company. A few weeks ago, they were clearing out their old inventory, and sent out a company wide email telling people they could come and get free games. The first few people there pretty much cleared the games out. They were walking away with thirty or forty copies of the same game. “For their friends,” was the excuse most of them gave when called on it. Yeah, right. Their friends on eBay, maybe.
I’d have been more pissed if the company I work for made any games anyone would actually want to play.
I love to cook and bring food into work, and luckily, I’ve never seen major problems with this. When I worked at a courthouse, we’d do potluck lunches every couple months, and a big extravagant one toward the holidays. EVERYONE brought stuff in, everyone was on their best behavior – polite and gracious – and any leftovers were offered first to the security, custodial, and maintenance staffs, and then taken home by whoever brought them in.
I currently work at a library, and I went to my first potluck lunch on Monday. Again, everyone was cool and polite, and my pan of homemade lasagna (the previous post struck a chord) was a huge hit. There was plenty left for the evening shift too, and the copious leftovers were stored in our two break room fridges for the next day, where we essentially had enough left to eat the same stuff again! Today I skipped breakfast at home, expecting more leftovers to grab when I got there, but everything was gone – I guess the evening shift people finally polished it all off or took what was left. But two days later, I can’t really blame them. It was cool people didn’t swoop down and steal mass quantities for “the folks back home.”
Tris:
Don’t let the greedy bastards get you down! That was a lovely, sweet gesture on your part. Don’t let it stop you from doing the same in the future. Keep spreading those gifts.
You might not ever concretely see it, but I figure that at some level, those idiots were noticed, and will have some consequence in the way others will treat them.
Keep your sweet head above it, and do your optomystifying deeds. The women who received the roses-- it probably made their day, and then spread on to others, too.
Do you work on Barbie’s Dream House Interactive with my dear old friend Marcus by any chance? 
The worst part about this, in my cynical imagination, is that it wasn’t even for eBay, for most people. It was just because they could. The games will probably become coasters. Why not? They’re free and there’s lots of them - oh, yeah, and other people don’t really exist.
Oh well then, old farts can get away with those under the “grandfather clause.” Just as long as you don’t end up like the Honorable Willie Don Schaefer! 
Now I’m curious, though: if you’re not the boss, and you were just handing out Valentine’s Day roses to your female co-workers as an individual oddball romantic gesture, why’d you put the “editorial, deliberately unspecific” “we love you” on the sign instead of “I love you”? Or if you meant it to be interpreted as a romantic gesture from the male workers in general to the female workers in general, why’d you turn down the offers from other male workers who asked to chip in?
The use, and creation of symbols works best when the greatest part of the image comes from the recipient. Too much detail is a very tempting error to make in such an expression. “You are loved” is more important than who it is who loves you.
The guys with the after the fact offers were . . . a day late. If they had wanted to, they could have brought in a heart shaped box of candy, and left it on the Team Station counter, with or without a note. The money was a trivial concern, once the decision to make the gesture was made. Besides, how much to you “charge” one of the eight guys who could have participated in a “we” project. It just wasn’t important to me.
Tris
I should add a little postscript here, about the anonymity of my little gesture. Evidently there was almost no mystery involved for the overwhelming majority of my coworkers. I am absolutely sure no one saw me doing it. I am equally sure that I told no one of my plans, or said anything about it that day. One of the ladies answered my question about how she knew who it was by saying, “Who else?”
I got some "thank you"s the next day, even a few in notes. (and a cookie!) I also got some explanations of how I should have done it, most of them implying that not protecting the roses from greed was a failure on my part. Those feel rather uncomfortable to me, but becoming the “flower police” was definitely never a possibility.
Tris
Well, I still think it was a very sweet impulse on your part, and I agree that it’s a shame that some people are greedy with the freebies. Here’s wishing you better luck on St. Patrick’s Day!
When I was in grade school, every year the teacher would encourage us to exchange Valentine’s cards with each other. Yep, romance with all the kids in class. The teacher was encouraging pedophilic orgies. In some cases, gay pedophilic orgies.
The office take-a-rose doesn’t seem so bad now, does it?
Don’t be silly. Wait a minute, this is the Pit—go on being silly if you feel like it! However, the “Valentine’s card” comparison is a strawman.
I never suggested that Tris was actually trying to proposition all the women in his building by handing out the traditional lover’s symbol of red roses to all of them on Valentine’s Day. I just think that mass-marketed parodies of traditional lover’s gestures—especially gender-specific ones—probably aren’t the most suitable ideas for the workplace.
Valentine’s Day festivities are a cute custom for kids and sex partners, but there are no kids or sex partners at work. (Well, there may be some sex partners at work, but it’s not supposed to be noticeable.) If your message is merely that you love your co-workers (and presumably not just your female co-workers), aren’t there more office-appropriate ways to show it?
The whole flower thing was great, and nice that people noticed, too.
On the quote above reminds me of pins we all got from the jewlery store (they were give aways on the counter) as kids; most of us still have at least one, and they stated simply “I am loved”. I look at the one I’ve got on display every day. I need to find some and hand them out to friends near and far.