Ingoring the White Elephant in the Room

Tis' the season for buying bad presents and stealing from the people you care about the most. Yep.... White Elephant gift exchanges!

My office "holiday" party was this afternoon. I love my office parties, too, because we get to booze and the old guys in the office make inappropriate sexual innuendos about things that are not sexual at all. It's ironic... we are so PC that we can't call it a "Christmas" party, yet we can make jokes about stripper poles and blue balls. Go figure.

Either way, I'm all about gift exchanges. I try to buy funny and witty gifts that are actually useful. Which is why I went to Target Sunday and with my $20 limit in mind, and was pleased with my 6 pack of Guinness Stout to go with these cool Guinness Pint Glasses.

I was pretty excited... I thought it was a cool gift that everyone would like. Well, I came into the office Tuesday morning and mentioned how excited I was about the White Elephant Gift Exchange. The person who set up the whole exchange told me "Girl- Don't be spending a bunch of money on that stuff! Buy stupid cheap gifts! That's what everyone does!" Well this being my first (and last) year to participate in my company's exchange, I didn't want to look like a show off or spend too much if everyone was buying really cheap stuff, so I took it back and went to the dollar store instead.

After scouring the shelves of the Dollar Tree and dodging the undisciplined hood rat kids wreaking havoc through the aisles, I thought I found the worst, cheapest, most random, cheesiest gift...

Yep... Checkers, a Koala Bear puzzle, and I threw in a random bag of Biscotti that I got at a gift exchange earlier that week. And to top it all off, it was in a "feliz navidad" bag. I thought I won, for sure.

So fast forward to today. As we start opening gifts, I begin to realize that I should have stuck with my first gift. Here were some of the other gifts opened first: Electronic Organizer Docking Station, 1 bottle of Patron, 1 bottle of Disaronno, an iTunes gift card, the George Bush Memoir book, a bucket with popcorn and "Coming to America" the movie... you get the idea. Man... I looked like an asshole. There were a few other bad gifts, but I hate being one of "those" people. I hate seeing disappointed looks on people's faces.

To make it even worse, I got to pick last, and I ended up with the docking station. Awesome for me, but you know everyone was like "Ugh. Her gift sucked, she doesn't deserve that". But then, they threw in a twist... they had everyone throw their number back in the Santa hat to select a "wild card pick" and who ever's number was drawn, they got to pick ANY gift, even if it was locked! Nooooo! Sure enough, they drew this engineer's number, and he looks right at me and points at my docking station. JERK! So then I had to take his crappy gift in exchange.

Without further adieu, I'm proud to present my 2010 white elephant work exchange gift.

Did I deserve the docking station? Not really. But come ON! I guess I had bad karma from the Koala puzzle. Lesson learned- never be THAT GIRL who brings the crappy gift. I'm sure you can imagine the jokes that followed since I technically relieved the Gary of the gift....

This weekend is the 2010 Kirkland Family Christmas/White Elephant/Nog Off. Hopefully this gift exchange story will not leave me in the same situation... with blue balls.