Secret Santa, Secret Stress.

Sometimes I really wish I was actually a novelist rather than a wannabe novelist and could stay at home with my computer all day instead of having to go into an office and do "corporate" things. This week's work trauma being the "Secret Santa" affair. I have no idea who came up with this delightful little scheme but it is a lot trickier than it sounds when you first hear about it. For those unschooled in the "Secret Santa" concept, there are in fact several ways it can be done, but thankfully our office chose the easiest. What you do, is you all decide on a budget, or if you are not present (as I wasn't) the ruling majority decides... ours was JPY500 which at today's exchange rate equates to about GBP2.14 or something so you can imagine that it's not going to get you very far. Then you write out everyone's name and put the pieces of paper in a hat - (or in our case a nasty plastic pocket that used to have Level Up Slips in it but now just makes the wall look unattractive!) - and then you each (secretly, of course) take a name from the hat - (or in our case a nasty plastic pocket that used to have Level Up Slips in it but now just makes the wall look unattractive) - and then you have to buy a gift within the budget for the person whose name you drew. In the past, when I have been forced to participate in such jolly old company spirited rubbish, we have all agreed to buy the tackiest gifts possible in order to have a laugh. Not this office, oh no, we were expected to get something sensible that the person would actually like. Anyway, of course I managed to forget that I have actually taken Monday and Tuesday off so I would not actually be there for the exchanging of the gifts... Not a problem. Unfortunately it also meant I was supposed to have handed in my gift today. Yeah, like I remembered. So I found myself in the position of having to go shopping after work because I had to talk to my boss at length during my lunch hour, (not his fault, Roxanne quit and went back to Australia last week and hardly anyone knew so we sort of didn't sort out things which could have done with being sorted before Kenny took over... Major shame though, I really liked Roxanne.) Again, not a problem but the lady whose name I picked out is somewhat difficult to buy for since I don't really know what she likes. And you can't just buy bath salts because people you don't know very well, might take that the wrong way... The real problem turned out to be the budget though, and I wasn't too bothered about going over it but I thought if some people get gifts which are obviously over the budget, others will get offended and all that sort of rubbish. Two hours, seriously, two hours later, I went back to the office with a reasonably nice set of chopsticks and a delightful chopstick rest. Lame or what?! I wish we could have gone for the traditional Christmas tat, I really do. Speaking of which, I checked jongudmund's blog this evening, only to find that they'd only gone and watched Bernard and the Genie without me.... Utterly depressing; every year we watched that together and had delicious Rocket Joe's pizza with mushroom and pineapple....