I recently recieved 3 very good tickets to a Toronto Maple Leafs game. They were given to me by a business associate (it’s one of those perks that sometimes come my way). Now, I don’t particularly care for hockey, or team sports in general, so I thought I’d give them away to a buddy of mine, his brother, and his brother’s fiancee, who is a big hockey fan but has never been to a game, having recently moved here from Hungary.
I mentioned this to my boss after the fact and she got all pissy with me saying that since they were given to me, I should have had to go. I can see her point, but considering that they were a corporate gift, I didn’t really take them personally, and just sort of thought of the people who would like them most.
So I’m thinking, okay, if I get a gift, do I have to ask what the acceptable uses are for it, or can I decide for myself? I’m not a regifter, or even a returner, especially when a gift is from one person to me. I appreciate personal gifts. But this was tickets to a sporting event I didn’t really want to attend, given from ABC Insurance Company to XYZ Insurance Brokers.
So I thought I’d ask you lot. Am I offside here, deserving of Seinfeldian scorn, or not so much. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
A gift is supposed to please you. If it pleases you to give your gift to friends, then why not? Your boss must be a very sad person if she allows others to control her life with gifts!
Wonder what would happen if someone gave her a Derringer for her birthday.
Once a gift is given, the recipient is free to use it as he or she sees fit. In this case, you got the tickets, you were free to give them to others who would appreciate them more than you would have. A good analogy is food. I am not a fan of pate, but if I’d been given a tin, I’d find someone who would use it.
OTOH, if the tickets had been given to you because your company wants to wine-and-dine a client, that’s different. The tickets aren’t a gift for you, they’re for client entertainment.
Three is a very odd number of tickets to receive. If your contact was going to be there (with the presumed fourth ticket from the set), you should have gone, for sure.
I think as a business gift you should, perhaps, have shared the gift with the office if you weren’t going to go, not some buddy of yours. A gift for some non-client facing support person who never gets those perks, or to your boss to use as a reward for a hard working employee, for example.
I should clarify that everyone in the office had been asked (there’s only six of us) before me. If I had said no, my boss would have given them away to an acquaintance of hers. Maybe that’s why she was mad. She may have had someone in mind.
That is an altogether different kettle of fish. Your boss should have made it clear she had a use for them if you didn’t want them. By not expressing that, she forfeits her right to be pissed off about what you do with your tickets. OTOH you (maybe) shouldn’t have taken them in the first place if you knew you weren’t going to use them yourself. Either way, it’s not a big enough deal for anyone to get too worked up about.
Basing your actions and the appropiatness thereof on a sitcom, even Seinfeld, though? That’s just wrong.
First, Seinfeld offers many good guidelines for modern living.
In the strictest sense once you have been given something it is yours to do whatever you want with. In polite society though it is never that simple.
For example you should never lie as part of getting a gift. Like, for example in Seinfeld there was an episode where Jerry bought a membership at a hair club for a friend of his. He bought it for his particular friend (who was already balding) because he had been diagnosed with cancer and was going to lose his hair during the treatments. However it ultimately comes out that the friend did not have cancer, but only thought he did briefly and then lied about having it and beating it because of the social benefits (everyone was nicer to him and etc.)
Likewise if your boss gave you these tickets asking you, “Hey do you want to go to his game?” And you said, “Yes” then you lied as part of getting the gift, putting you in the wrong socially. If she just asked you “do you want these tickets?” and there was no underlying assumption that for whatever reason whoever took the tickets actually needed to go to the game, then you committed no foul unless your taking the tickets deprived someone else in the office from going to the game when they wanted to do so (which you said it did not.) As gifts given freely to an office at large in general must be distributed to all desirous members of said office before any of the gift(s) can be given to an extraneous party.
A good example of this is food made for an office. If a coworker brings in a tray of cookies free for all it’s a faux pas to walk over to them and pour them all into a bag so you can take them home for your kids.
I too am a huge hockey fan who has never been to an NHL game*, as I’ve lived in non-league cities since I discovered the game. Speaking from this biased perspective, I would say that the gift you received should go to the people who would enjoy it most.
Now, it would be different if you were invited to go to the game with a friend, or you were supposed to take a coworker’s disabled brother or something. But it sounds like it’s not like that at all. I say, give 'em to the people who want 'em. I would really be tickled pink if someone gave me a ticket they’d gotten to an LA Kings game because they knew I’d enjoy it more. Actually, I’d say that’d be the quickest way to my heart. It’s a shame that nobody’s ever tried it. They’d probably be my lifelong friend.
*Except for one exhibition game in Phoenix. That doesn’t count because it was free and meaningless and none of the players were really trying.
If you ever come to Calgary during hockey season, fetus, we’ll take you to an NHL game*. You can watch Iggy put the beat down in person.
The OP - gifts can be given with strings/understandings (eg. $200 to pay your rent, with the understanding that it goes to rent, not drinking, etc.) If this gift wasn’t given with any conditions, do as you wish with it. Actually, I think you have the wrong sitcom - I think “Frasier” went into this in-depth.
*If you were really lucky, we’d take you to a lacrosse game. Very fun to watch live.
I dunno. If you had gotten this gift for your birthday or some other event, I would agree with you.
But it sounds more like you boss asked: “Hey, who wants these tickets?”
And then you said: “I do.”
But you didn’t. You took them and gave them away. (At least you didn’t sell them) Seems like if you weren’t planning on using them, you should have let your boss give them to someone that she knew would use them. They were hers to give away.
Of course, I wasn’t there. Maybe it didn’t happen that way. Maybe you said: “I want them, my friends would love them” If that is what you told her, then she had all the info up front.
I’m not viewing these as a gift that were bought *for *you. That makes the deal a little different to me. Your boss may have wanted to give them to someone she knew would use them and enjoy them.
The thing to remember is that the tickets were given by company reps to your company, not to you.
I don’t know how things work over there, but here the expectation is that your company will use the tickets for their staff, not for random individuals. Quite often the company issuing the tickets will have a representative also at the event, and use it as an opportunity for low-key ‘product branding’ (ie, you associate their company with something nice).
This does them no good if the person using their tickets is utterly unconnected to the company. (It is their Publicity budget that’s paying for the tickets, after all.)
That’s very possible, and one of the perqs of being a Manager. It’s probably more to do with the ticket-issuing company following up with her later, though. I’m working on the assumption that things work much the same from country to country - in which case, by giving the tickets to non-company people, you may have put her in an embarassing position with the other company.
If your boss had chosen to send someone in her place (or known you were going to) she’d likely have contacted the person who gave her the tickets directly and explained the situation, asking them if it was still okay to use the tickets for a non-company person.
Again, that’s just how it’s done here. I make no claims to know how things work elsewhere. But you did say you were wondering why she’d be angry with you, so that’s a couple of solid reasons from this side of the pond.
