Bad Manners and Brimstone

Ugh... I hate work place gifting! I don't particularly like my coworkers... I just tolerate them, so I have no interest in gifting them. Luckily, I am in an office where it is not done (partly, because I squashed it years ago.) The new guy (he's been here 9 months) bought everyone a bottle of wine. It was a kind gesture, but I figured the best way to prevent this is to not reciprocate. It feels wrong, but I do not want to start something. Well... something got started today. I just got an email from this coworker thanking me for the gift basket... I obviously didn't send it. So, now I have to send the awkward reply. I haven't quite figured out how to say "it wasn't me" yet.

(On a side note, he is the kind of guy to write this email knowing it wasn't me as a power play. I have no proof and will assume the best, but he's done other strange things to make me think he's pulling stunts.)

I like Hmmm's response.   Succinct and to the point.  Polite but straightforward.  Perfect.

How about just a cheery "Nope, that's not from me! Good luck finding your mystery gift-giver!"?

Just treat it like a wrong number--he emailed his thank-you to the wrong person.

This is what I'd do. Let him know he got the wrong person so he can find the correct person who deserves the thank you.

OnyxBird's response is much better than my fantasy reply "You are welcome!!!"

How do you guys always know how to make things so easy?!? Thanks for the feedback!

Because when it's you/us personally, we tend to overthink. "Is this right?" "Is this wrong?" "What if I sound too cold?" "What if I sound too pushy?" 

Could some co-worker have sent the gift basket as a group gift? After he gave everyone a bottle of wine, someone may have thought that it was a good idea to give him something in return, and sent it as if it were from everyone. I would try to find out before responding to him. If this isn't the case, respond honestly as others have suggested.
Personally, I hate gift stuff going on in the workplace. I feel that there is a difference between your work life and your social life.
A well run workplace would have policies. My preferred policy would be no gift exchanges, showers, etc. at work. If a couple of co-workers are friends they can do it on their own. Sometimes co-workers who are friends meet for drinks after work. This would be when they can exchange Christmas gifts, birthday gifts, and so on.

This is an excellent thought. In this case, I feel very comfortable that no one did this. (In fact, I would have been the most likely culprit and we know my feelings on the entire situation.)

Agreed. Coworkers who want to organize gift exchanges should do so on their own time.

I sent the more breezy reply. Not me; hope you find 'em. No reply back, which is fine in my book.

It might just have been worth mentioning to the team leader, the office manager, or HR, whichever seemed more appropriate in your workplace, that this person's well-meant gesture might easily pressurise a whole office into gift-giving that had been getting on just fine without it, and could they see what they could do to stop that happening? It's very easy for one such action to start a domino effect, so that everyone ends up feeling obligated to spend significant money and thought on presents for their colleagues, and that's something that management should prevent.

One way to stop that happening is to have an official but strictly low-key, low-cost gift exchange. I think I may have told how my own old workplace used to do it on the ehell board, but it was the best system I've ever heard of, so here goes again:

A few weeks before Christmas, Santa's sack would appear next to our team leader's desk. Everyone would buy a stocking-filler-type item suitable to any gender below a given value (originally it was £5, but over the years it went up a bit), wrap it nicely, and find a moment to surreptitiously drop it in. At our team Christmas lunch, someone would be designated to be Santa, and they would dip at random into the sack saying 'This is for Ashley! And here's one for Deena! This one's a weird shape, let's say it's for Tareq!' till everybody had a present. (You were allowed to say, 'whoops, I put that one in - drop it back and give me something else'.) it was great because there was minimal cost and no angsting about 'what on earth would Shirley like?', but lots of festive unwrapping and jokes about who got what. And if two people actually preferred what each other had got in the lucky dip, there was no possible offence in their openly swapping them.

Quite a few years back when I was raising the DDs by myself and struggling a bit on my budget I stopped gifting my coworkers. The first year I didn't gift/reciprocate I told each one of them (as they presented me with a gift "Thank you very much, but please don't do this next year." I didn't feel right about refusing the gift, but thought I said politely enough that I didn't want to partake in office gifting.

Did that work? Nope. The next year I received gifts from each member of the group and one coworker even said "I know that you don't want to participate, I just wanted to give you something from my heart."

All of the gifts were within the $10-20 range and at the time I thought that amount for 10+ people each? Yikes? Take that out of the budget for my DDs gifts? Or the mortgage? Selfish, maybe?

This continued on for several years until each of them retired or went on there different ways. I did feel guilty about not reciprocating and I sincerely wished that they would have left me out of the gift-giving (the gifts were personally handed out or left on a desk, not an event). I did send each of them a personal email thanking them for the gift and mentioning something special about why I appreciate working with them.

But I still felt like a scrooge.


I want to share with you a couple of gifts that I received today from non-coworkers, not in my department, but people that I do work for (customers).

One person came into my cube and handed me a card. He said "Just a small something to say thank you for all you do for me" then walked away. I opened the card and there was, taped to the inside of the card, a small square of godiva chocolate (sea-salt caramel!) and a short note about how much he appreciated working with me.

Another person came to my cube and said something like "You always do great work for me. etc." then handed me a small square of Russells chocolate and said "Thank you."


It hit me that those were the best office-gifting gifts ever. Something small with awesome words of praise and thank you's.

I wish I would have thought of this years ago when I declined to participate in the $10-20 gifts from coworkers.