Giving at the Office: Musings from the Corner Office

You know the year has officially started when the Girl Scouts arrive….  Down the hall they file, shyly clutching an order form with one little hand and a coworker's leg with the other.

The troops’ timing is suspiciously shrewd for such a noble organization, just as your New Year’s resolution resolve is crumbling, and you’re starting to fantasize about swapping your salad for a Do-si-do with a sleeve of Thin Mints, but that’s another story….

The cookie crunch signals the start of the yearlong parade of people wanting to collect on your paycheck.  Somewhere along the line, the office became an acceptable place for parents to work their colleagues over, fleecing them for fundraisers that support children they don’t know, as well as their various school, club, and sports activities. 

There are so many “annual” kiddy campaigns you can now count on giving at the office at regular intervals throughout the year. Girl Scout cookie collections are followed in swift succession by spring magazine flings, swim team sales, back-to-school donut drives and pee-wee football fundraisers…. And all of these are just a warm up for the mack-daddy season of solicitation: the great holiday hit up.

Come early November, my desk is covered with gift catalogues “thoughtful” coworkers passed along from their youngsters. Rolls of garish gift wrap! Santa gift sacks, menorah magnets, and Kwanza kitsch! Pages of compelling crap like sticky sweet vanilla scented candles, overpriced sugar cookie mixes, and tins of chocolate turtles. Inevitably some ill-advised institution tries to go the packaged-pepperoni-and-smoked-sausage route. Take my advice and don’t even bother to thumb through these brochures—it’s technically impossible to make big, fat processed meat logs look appetizing!   

Thanks to persuasive PTAs, it seems that at least once I month I find myself spending my kind-of-hard-earned cash on things I don’t really want, like, or need, all for the pleasure of helping someone else’s children raise enough Bronco Bucks or Panda Points to win a plastic flute or similar nonsense. Not that I always mind—I’m a sucker for a good cause and a cute kid, but what gets my goat is that I rarely deal with the actual “fund raisers” anymore. While my mother made me don the often unattractive uniform of whatever organization I was shilling for, and personally go house-to-house begging for a buy, these days, indulgent and/or pushy parents take on the selling themselves.

Now it’s all about corporate giving, and I always seem to have at least one colleague circling my office armed with extra order forms and authority over something that directly affects my corporate quality-of-life.

The worst offenders are usually the ones you don’t actually work with, like the oddball from accounting whose name you’ve never quite caught looking for a handout for his cousin’s kids, or they are just the ones you find most annoying, like the admin who browbeats you into buying a bucket of caramel popcorn from her son and then proceeds to eat over half of it when it arrives.

Recently a nervy colleague who couldn’t be bothered to walk four doors down to my office and badger me in person sent me the prices for her kid’s cheesecake scheme over email! The worst part? I caved and signed up for two.

Remember, if you don’t have anything nice to say—or to sell—my door is always open.

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Bitchy Betsy is a vice president at a well-known Fortune 100 company. When pressed, she’ll admit she loves her job. However, that doesn’t keep her from mercilessly ridiculing corporate culture. Got something catty to add? Post your comments here.