“I suppose there is always the cliche of a man getting his wife a mop or some other cleaning supply.”
My (former) spouse gave me a huge (outside-style) garbage can for Christmas. And an over-the-door canned goods rack.
He actually meant well :smack:
Ouch!
But I don’t think I was lucky so much as my sister was smart and considerate.
I almost unintentionally gave a mean gift to my brother’s family. He thought that the box that I’d sent was just that – a box full of unrelated stuff. When it arrived he just put it under the Christmas tree. He disregarded the label that said “Live lobsters – refrigerate immediately.” Fortunately, the dog clued him in.
Anyone who gives out those fake lottery tickets should be thrown into a tank of man-eating pirranhas. The “maternity top because you haven’t given me a grandchild yet, and I demand that you produce!” is just sad.
I think there’s something on the Y chromosome that makes (not all but a lot of them that I’ve encountered) men horribly bad gift-givers. Not malicious, just clueless or misfired humor.
One former manager got some doozies from her husband: women’s Alfred Dunner clothing, size 1X (when she was a size 4, tops and shopped in the junior’s department), a hose reel for the back yard (just the reel, no hose. She had no interest in gardening or anything like that) and windshield wiper blades for the wrong car.
I worked with a woman one summer whose husband gave her a gym membership for their anniversary (something she swore she never even hinted at wanting.) It’s the gift that says, “I love you, honey, but you’re fat.”
A yankee swap is where everyone brings in a wrapped gift, and then is issued a random number. Person #1 chooses a gift and unwraps it. Person #2 can either choose a new gift and keep it, or give it to person #1 (still wrapped) and steal person #1’s gift. Person #3 can steal a gift from person #1 or #2. This continues until everyone has had a turn.
It’s really sort of unfair, as the person with the highest number has the choice of every gift in the room. The one time I participated, which was at work, upper management had the highest numbers.
Well played, sir. More workplace exchanges should go this way. The one time I participated in one, the other person and I wound up giving each other a $10 gift card. (Which could have been worse, but frankly I’d rather have had a bottle of alcohol.)
When we do the Yankee swap in the family, you pick a wrapped gift when it’s your turn, then you have the option of keeping it or trading/stealing from another, with any one gift limited to being stolen 3 times. And if you were the first to pick, once all gifts are unwrapped, you can steal anything except the 3-times stolen stuff. Then when it’s all over, all bets are off and the horse trading can begin.
It’s been fun enough that everyone always wants to do it again the next year.
Yankee Swaps can be a lot of fun or they can be stupid.
I’ve done a Yankee Swap with a group of girlfriends for years. We all bring an ornament. Sometimes the ornaments are silly or funny, but they’re always nice. I can pick out at least a dozen ornaments on my tree that I’ve gotten from this Swap. We eat too much and drink too much spiked egg nog, and have a blast.
The stealing is the best part!
I worked in an office years ago, and we tried to do a Yankee Swap, but everyone was too concerned about being “nice” and no one would take anyone else’s gift. It didn’t help that the office manager, who had organized it, gently admonished people that, “Oh, she really likes that. No one steal it!” Stealing someone else’s gift is the best part!
In our neck of the woods, the deep south, we call the Yankee Swap something else. “Dirty Santa”. As long as nobody purposely brings a much cheaper or crappier gift its fun and everybody generally ends up with something they can be at least somewhat happy with. There are variations on how many times you can “steal” and when you can and can’t steal.
When I was about 12, I really needed to get my first bra. I really couldn’t say that to my dad, and there wasn’t anybody else to tell. I didn’t have any money to go buy one or any way to go to a store if I did have any money. It was totally humiliating.
That Christmas, we went to my aunt and uncle’s house, and as we were opening presents, my aunt handed me a small package and said quietly, “Open this discreetly.” I almost fainted with relief. I was sure she had noticed my problem. I took the package in another room and opened it. It was underpants.
I can’t say it was a mean present, and if I had had the assertiveness to say what I needed, I might have gotten it. But I was crushed.
I’ve been in good Yankee swaps and bad ones. It depends on the people there, and it actually works better with a group of people that don’t know each other too well - say, a huge group of offices. That way there’s no underlying hostility, and everyone is willing to play nice, but fun.
During my marriage, my in-laws got me a sweater every xmas. I do not wear sweaters. They never ever saw me wearing a sweater, including the ones they bought me. The first year I said nothing, figuring they’d catch on. After three or four years it was impossible to politely tell them. The marriage was a (too) long one. My wife didn’t think it was right to re-gift/donate/dispose of the sweaters. Eventually there was an area in the attic devoted to boxed sweaters, new-in-box.
Hey! the blonde is Ramona Nowitzski!
My running club does it just this way. Although if something is stolen from you, you get a turn right away rather than wait for yours to come around.
Of course, there are no bad gifts as 80% is running related and the rest is beer or wine.
Beats the heck out of me. Which is why I posted the OP.
I mean, really – even if I utterly hated the person whose name I drew, I’d just give them some candy or Yet Another Mug and be done with it.
There are two types of rest rooms in our building. Each floor has two large, multi-stalled rooms for visitors, one for men, one for women. (Er, I assume the men’s bathroom has multiple stalls, never actually visitied it.) These have those toilet paper dispensers that hold a pair of rolls, and you need a key to open the dispenser to replace the rolls.
Each floor also has a couple of small bathrooms with just a single toilet and sink within the ‘employees only’ areas. (These are unisex.) The toilet paper dispenser is like what you find in a home: one roll of tp on a spring mounted, uh, roller thingy. A backup supply of paper for these rooms is in the same closet as a lot of other office supplies. The rules are, if you finish a roll, or even see it’s really low, you are supposed to go to the supply room, get another roll and replace it. (Yes, this is somewhat retarded, but apparently they’d found out long ago that if you left extra rolls stacked on top of the toilet or wherever, they just ‘vanished’ somehow.)
There had been several times (like maybe every other week) that people had found a bathroom with no paper. There was grumbling about it, and they even posted signs in the rooms to remind people about getting the replacements.
So what happened was that someone headed into one of these bathrooms right after Our Suspect came out, and discovered after… doing her business… that there was No Paper. Which is really bad, but this time:
A) the person had used the bathroom just a half hour earlier (the aftermath of a fried clam dinner the day before) and had herself gotten a new roll and replace it.
and
B) it wasn’t just that the paper was used up – the cardboard center roll was gone, too.
and
C) she had actually been waiting to use the toilet, had heard the toilet flush, seen Our Suspect (female) come out … and the woman hadn’t said anything about there being no tp to the waiting woman.
After word of that got around, people started taking notice, and… well.
I don’t think it was really a mean gift, but I’ll shoehorn it into this thread anyway:
When my stepdaughter was in high school, she was one of the real cool kids. Rich, beautiful, popular, etc. One year we went to Goodwill and found her this long frumpy sweater-dress. It was kind of orangey and had fake pearls around the cuffs and collar. She opened it and was obviously at a loss for words, so we all squealed over how wonderful it was and sent her off to her room to try it on. She went away hesitantly, but put her head out the door a moment later and caught the whole family silently writhing with laughter.
I’m the one who’s being the “mean” gift giver this year, but not really. See, the Boy asked for a computer this year as a combo birthday & Christmas gift. Due to a list of financial circumstances, it wasn’t ordered until the late evening of Sunday the 18th. I was given an estimated date of December 27 for arrival, and the Boy was given a heads-up that his big gift would be delayed a tiny bit. I joked with him that I’d wrap some empty boxes or some rocks or something so he’d have gifts under the tree.
Imagine my surprise when we arrived home on Tues. December 20 and there are two UPS packages sitting in the dining room! (My niece just brought them in, not realizing that a gift was involved. (Niece isn’t dim, but she’s heavily medicated right now!) Anyway, I hustled the boxes off to my bedroom, and convinced Zack that it was actually his sister’s gift that arrived earlier than expected, so that he would “help” by keeping her out of my room*. (She’s totally in on this one.) When we open gifts, his first two or three will be empty boxes or bricks or such, so that by the time he gets to the real gifts, he’ll be expecting something like a box of bubble wrap or a brick… This will be awesome!
*The final artistic touch: I told Zack that, if his sister seemed to be acting odd, that she’d been told that the mystery boxes are his present, so that she’d cooperate with staying out of my bedroom. 
The brunette’s been in quite a few things as well, like Scrubs.
More clueless and uncaring than mean (which would have required thought or consideration of the recipient) I have to go w/ the Stepmother of a boyfriend and her gift to me. I drink Woodchuck HARD cider. We kept some at their house (in the basement beer fridge which I’m starting to think is a Midwest oddity). Starting at Thanksgiving, Stepmother offers me hot mulled cider. “No thank you, I don’t care for hot cider.” “Oh, I see you drinking Woodchuck so I thought you would.” “Nope, this is different; I don’t like hot cider.” End of discussion for most people who’ve known each other nearly a year, right?
No.
Every time I’m at their house, she offers to make me a cup of hot mulled cider. I politely decline every time for 3 weeks. Christmas morning, what do you think I got from her? A cider mulling kit. She has a huge smile on her face, thrilled that she got me exactly what I wanted since I like Woodchuck so much! I politely accept it and on the way home drop it in the Salvation Army drop off bin.
I’m right there with you up until “ask him to take the cost out of her paycheck or bonus.” That’s just ridiculous. Any boss who would actually deduct the cost of a single roll of toilet paper (let alone one anal enough to figure that out) is a boss not worth working for. Any office environment that expects an employee to go through something like that sound soul crushing and miserable.
Now the letting the boss know part, that’s fine, but the ASKING to have it docked from your PAYCHECK part…egads.
Worst gift ever - small group of coworkers had an impromptu gift exchange one year. Led by the overbearing obnoxious foreman. I suspect it was so he could give his gift with as much attention as possible - he gave a guy a box of tampons and when he opened it yelled “So you’ll stop your fu*&^ng whining and crying all the time!”
Thing is, this guy didn’t whine and cry excessively. The foreman was just a total douche and didn’t like that one guy. So he set up a frickin gift exchange just so he could humiliate him in front of the other guys. It was never done previously, and never done again. That’s pretty mean…
Not a Christmas gift but…
I went to China a couple years ago and bought a couple watches. One of them I liked just the styling of and it was an “Omega” watch. Or at least that’s what it said. It’s 99.99999% sure it’s a counterfeit. Anyways, I had it packed away and found it after moving a couple months ago. I mentioned it to a co-worker who said her fiance always wanted an Omega watch and asked if she could borrow it. Sure, she took it home and had him close his eyes and put it in his hands. She didn’t expect him to starting sobbing uncontrollably. Apparently, it then turned into a bit of a fight as well when she revealed that it was mine.
I ended up having him keep the watch because I felt so bad at her “joke”.
Guess what he deserves this year?