Secret Santa: Likes & Dislikes

So our office has started their annual Secret-Santa gift exchange. The concept is simple: a small gift every day or so and a $15 gift at the end. I got a $24 gift on sale for $10, so I'm just putting free pamphlets and business cards in my person's stocking and blowing them away with the awesome gift in the end so they forgive me for cheesy gifts throughout the month. I may have to print out a label that says $24 for this to work though. No wait, MSRP is right there above the barcode!

Now, to make sure we don't all get horrible gifts (the spirit of the season after all is only getting what you want) an email was sent out requesting that everyone reply back with likes and dislikes, so the mediator can pass that information along to the appropriate people.

Because we want to only give small gifts, I wanted to make sure my secret santa didn't feel obligated to get me lots of high-dollar gifts, as people normally should feel compelled to do. Instead, I provided a simple list of likes and dislikes that I hope will result in avoiding "junky gifts for the office". Seriously, who needs a lightup snowman that holds paper-clips, I mean the winter is the worst time to require people to use their hands to remove small pieces of metal in order to read a document. (Plus you never know when a paperclip is going to come to life and start giving you advice on your current office document.)

So here's the list:

Likes:

• Un-ruled notebooks
• Pens
• Pencils
• Sticky-note pads
• Coffee/coffee related paraphernalia
• Stuff to make coffee breath go away
• Loving emails to the helpdesk requesting IT help
• Confirmation emails of canceled MySpace pages.

Dislikes:

• Sugar
• iTunes music (Amazon MP3’s rock, and are cheaper too)
• Stuff that takes up room on my desk (other than sticky-note pads and coffee cups)
• Computer-related stuff
• Unloving emails to the helpdesk
• MySpace
• The fact that the mediator now knows everything about everybody, and can use this to plot against us and gain unmerited favor from supervisors and eventually take over the company and fire us all, only to replace us with her friends that have similar Likes and Dislikes as herself so our office can finally have an annual superhero convention that previous office staff are not invited to with too high of an entry fee now that we no longer have jobs.

It should probably be mentioned that we do not have evidence (other than the superhero paraphernalia in her office) to lead to the final item on my Dislikes list. Then again, we have no evidence against this either.