We have a best present thread, why not a worst present thread.
My little brother and his now ex gave me a 5 year old Lake Speed (former NASCAR driver) t-shirt. I probably would not have minded except for a few things.
It was used, both armpits had holes in them.
It still had the price tag from Value Village, a local chain similiar to Goodwill. $1.49.
It was a size medium. At the time I wore an extra large.
I was able to intercept my gift to them (a $30 gift certificate to the Keg, a local steak house). My girlfriend and I had a nice dinner a few nights later. I stapled the shirt to my garage wall, it took some moths about 3 years to eat most of it.
Used underwear, from my grandmother. My sister and I each got half the package (three pairs apiece), all of which had pops in the elastic and two of which had skidmarks. :eek: We also got 4 pairs each of socks, which we assume were also used.
Worst is hard, 'cause I have gotten so many bad ones. One year I got a Mickey Mouse Sweat Shirt with Mickey Bowling. I’m not the type of man who would wear a cutesy Mickey shirt, I don’t bowl and it was much too small for me. One year I got a reading light so I could read in bed. I do read a lot - but I am single, so I don’t have to worry about keeping someone awake while reading. One year I got a combination wallet AND toolkit. It came packaged that way. Not so bad I guess, but why would you pair the two?
Every clothing item my mother-in -law has ever gotten me. Let’s just say our tastes are completely opposite. I just don’t like the kind of clothing that middle age women wore in the early seventies.
Remember those stupid electronic football games? The ones where you lined up little plastic men on a metal “field,” then turned on a vibrator, and watched them go?
I’ve been told that, even today, there are guys who play that game, and take it very seriously. I have it on good authority that these guys are very strategic, and can manipulate the plastic players to go in any direction desired. Good for them
But no kid I knew (and loads of my friends and relatives got these same games) ever figured out how to do ANYTHING with it! We’d spend ages lining up men, then turn on the vibrator, and…
NOTHING! Most “players” either spun around in circles, or scattered every which way.
So, while our parents meant well, and while we were all excited to GET these games, they always turned out to be the worst imaginable presents.
Something called “Fart Sludge” and a book of sexual euphamisms from the U.K. - I’d say my sister spent about $10 on this gift for my wife and I. Both of us are professionals as are my sister and her husband. I guess I would have thought it a nice gift if I was 10 years old. I thought it was a joke gift and kept waiting for her to give us something real.
That year, my wife and I spent about $100 on her and my brother-in-law, getting them a gift certificate to their favorite expensive restaurant, movie tickets, and a another ‘certificate’ we made saying would would babysit their kids so they could use the other certificates.
Every since that disaster, we have mutually agreed to not get each other gifts and just get gifts for their kids. She still doesn’t understand why I suggested it…
I can’t stand when people give me little figurines. Do I look like the kind of person who likes them? What are you supposed to do with those things, anyway… sell them at a yard sale for a nickel? No, you can’t, b/c you can’t be caught selling gifts. Arghh.
Oh God, yes. Or the equally useless and irritating–and very similar–things like one I got a few years ago: A little plate that doesn’t work as a plate at all, because there is a cutesy-pukesy raised figure of a little girl ballerina right smack in the middle of it, it’s all very pink, and it comes with a holder so it can sit straight up on the shelf and collect dust. :rolleyes:
I have a crazy religious aunt who gave me an Atari 2600 video game called “Bible Adventures” – this was in 1992. I know exactly where she got it too, a religious knick-knack shop in her town called “Glad Tidings” where I remember seeing it as a child some ten years earlier. It had sat in place so long that the front was sunfaded to illegibility, and the best part: ten years worth of overlapping price stickers as the thing was gradually discounted to 99¢.
I take that back! The laugh we had over it made it priceless.
My Grandmother bought me a pack of blank video-tapes one year when i was about ten. I wouldn’t have minded if she’d got everyone crap presents, but my younger brother got a Ninja Turtle Action Figure and my elder sister a cool album (i think it was Vanilla Ice).
Needless to say that after a sufficient amount of bullying my brother “agreed” to swap presents.
I got this 8" tall wooden reindeer from my evil sister. It’s torso was designed to be a small storage box for something, but for what? The box was made of wooden slats spaced far enough apart that you couldn’t use it for candy – pieces would fall out of it. It was too small to hold magazines, even small format ones like TV Guide or Reader’s Digest, neither of which I subscribed to anyway.
All i could fugure to do was drape my gloves over it. But I gave up in a couple of weeks – I decided my coat pockets were better locations for my gloves, and besides, the reindeer things was atrociously ugly. I tossed it in the trash – I wouldn’t saddle anyone else with such a peice of crap.
This wasn’t a Christmas present, but a brthday present. When I was fourteen a friend of mine gave me a Hall and Oates tape. Apparently he had no clue at all about my musical tastes as I HATED Hall and Oates (I still hate them). The tape was clearly used as the case was scratched and the tape itself showed signs of wear. On top of this, when he wrapped it he took a five-pound weight from an old weight set and put it in a box with the tape to give me the impression that the gift he was giving was something heavier, and therefore something of value :rolleyes: . I don’t know what happened to the tape, but I never once played it. I was tempted to drop the enclosed weight on the tape.
