Office Christmas gift exchanges?
Our company is organizing one of those grab-a-gift-from-the-table gift exchanges. My client’s office is arranging one, too. I’m not allowed, for ethics reasons, to give anyone a gift at my client’s office. But somehow swapping $20-limit goodies works, since I don’t know who specifically will get it? (Yep, I looked it up in my client’s online ethics manual: if I don’t know who I’m giving it to, it’s completely ethical.)
Seems like then I’m not giving to make someone’s day brighter, since I have no real idea who I’m gifting to or what they’d like. Forgive my Scrooge-i-ness, but it seems like then I’m giving so I can get something from the table. Something which someone else has no idea whether I’d like.
I can’t help but thinking we’d be a little more in the Christmas spirit if we all just put cards on the table that said “I put a coat on someone for you today”, or “I gave someone dinner in your (non-specific, ethically pardonable) name today”.
Add comment December 3rd, 2008