THE WORST CORPORATE GIFTS

Did you ever get an awful or ridiculous gift from your company? Here are some examples:
– “I once attended a conference where everyone got a blown glass sculpture. An incredibly fragile blown glass sculpture. Throughout the final session, and the bus ride back to our hotel, the sounds of breaking glass could be heard – if it touched anything, it went kaboom.”
– “My company gave us $100 gift cards. Good, right? They came in these big boxes which you’d open to find a hammer and a chunk of concrete that you had to bash your way through to get to your gift card. Employees spent the afternoon hammering the concrete. We had desks smashed up, a ridiculous number of wireless mice destroyed, and one guy missed his rock and slammed his cell phone dead center.”
– “During the busy season, everyone was required to work a certain amount of unpaid overtime. In ‘gratitude,’ the company owners would periodically parade through the office handing out very small, cheap gifts. Once it was a packet of off-brand tortilla chips and a shelf-stable container of ‘nacho cheese.’ We workers were expected to drop whatever we were doing to cheer for the owners as they benevolently handed out cheap snacks, like aristocrats handing pennies to the peasants.”
– “My company gave everyone a deck of cards with the company logo on it. And instead of the standard, suits and numbers, the cards had the Company Values on them. The top card contained instructions for a go-fish-type game we were meant to play with them. ‘Do you have any Innovation? Go fish.’”
– “Coupons for a discount chain oil change. We were in NYC, many of us didn’t even have a car.”
– “For implementing a test supply reduction program that saved the company hundreds of thousands of dollars we got a key ring with the company logo. For 15 years service I got a $5 pocket knife.”
– “I once received a rock with the word ‘trust’ written on it in sharpie. Morale was particularly bad at the time and management thought “trust rocks” would help. Some rocks were thrown.”
– “For my 15th anniversary on the job I got a big, heavy medallion with my name spelled wrong. For my 20th anniversary, I got a brass mantel clock, with my name spelled differently, but still wrong.”
* Quit complainin’. You all got a paycheck, didn’t ya?
* Company logo items are great ’cause on evenings and weekends you can be reminded of your sucky job.
* Suddenly those stress balls they gave us here last year don’t seem so bad.
* Corporate America, if you’re listening: you can’t go wrong with the occasional surprise pizza lunch party.
* PHONE TOPIC: What’s the worst corporate gift you ever got?