the shared yoga mat, the fire hazard, and other tales of poorly thought-out corporate gifts

Earlier this month, we talked about corporate gifts that went terribly wrong. You shared so many outrageous stories that I had to split my favorites into two parts. Part one was here, and here’s part two.

1. The fire hazard

After college I spent some time temping for a cargo airline. When someone had been with the company for five years, they were given a little glass globe paperweight. Part of my job was sending them out – a lot of the company’s employees were pilots and flight crew, so they didn’t come in to an office, and we mailed the gifts to their homes.

After a while we got an email from one of the pilots. He had placed his globe on his desk by the window and walked away from it. He came back to the smell of smoke. Apparently, the globe had acted like a magnifying glass and focused the sunlight onto a pile of papers on his desk, and those papers had started to burn.

So yeah, perfectly fine gift, as long as it doesn’t burn down your house.

2. The shared yoga mat

We were once given 1 yoga mat to share between 7 employees. I guess the idea was that we could use it at work when we needed time to decompress. I have been tempted to steal it and take it home so many times, because no one has ever used it at work, and I could use a new yoga mat.

3. The clock

I manage a global ambassador program and we wanted to gift our ambassadors a small token of appreciation. We worked with a local vendor to create a lovely desk piece that opened to have a small clock dial on one side and some traditional ethnic art on the other. Sent the packages out and a few weeks later I got a distressed email from a Chinese ambassador. The postal service was asking her to pay to get the package and she wanted to know what was in it. Told her it was a decorative piece with a clock and she absolutely refused to accept it. Apparently sending clocks to people in China (and maybe other East Asian countries) was bad luck and a way to wish them dead – like your time’s up! We told her to return to sender and we sent her an alternative design minus clock.

Lesson learnt — check with local team before making decisions about gifting.

4. The Oreos

At an old job at a major research university, we got $5 Panera gift cards and two Oreos. Only two; three would have been breaking the bank.

5. The laptop bags

The gift in itself was not bad but no one had thought through the context. I went to a conference where on registration we were given our conference pack and a complementary laptop bag. I’d love to know the thought process that came up with having with everyone at the conference carry identical laptop bags, what could possibly go wrong?

6. The single cookie

My company touted a “big surprise”for three weeks before a big reveal at a 1,000-person company “all hands.”

Ladies and gentlemen, the surprise was a single cookie that we had to have shipped to us. We all got ONE cookie to enjoy in 5-8 business days. It was insulting to many of us, plus all the packaging included in that choice made it difficult to defend our B-corp status later.

Genuinely, would’ve taken the ole pizza party over that situation.

7. The seeds of appreciation

For Administrative Professionals Day, HR would give out plants for our desks and called it “seeds of appreciation.” Except most of us had offices and desk locations with no access to natural light, and took public transit to and from work, so it was difficult to transport a plant home during rush hour. Worse, the plants would usually attract bugs (or already have them to start) causing our managers to ask us to throw out the plants after a week or two.

8. The oblivious CEO

My husband used to work at JCPenney when he was a teenager and it was announced one Christmas that everyone would be getting gifts from the CEO. This was after they made all employees work through Thanksgiving afternoon/evening for Black Friday. Most people expected JCPenney giftcards or something similar.

Instead, they got little bags with toothbrushes, toothpaste, deodorant, and best of all, a postcard with a picture of the CEO and his family in Hawaii for the holidays. So basically, “Thanks for the vacation, you all stink, by the way.”

9. The “gift bags”

When I was a Teach for America corps member, they (somewhat out of nowhere) decided to start mandatory Saturday all-day trainings, and advertised “gift bags for your classroom” as one of the perks. First, we live in an area with horrible weekend traffic so it took me over an hour to get to the site they picked and more than two hours to get home. Second, the “gift bags” were tiny dime bags (the little mini clear ziplock) with: a rubber band, a cotton ball, a lifesaver, a single piece of very stale Halloween candy, and a tiny poem that desperately tried to tie the garbage together in a coherent narrative. It was a while ago but it was something like, “A little chocolate can save your life and as a teacher you hold everything together like a rubber band.” Couldn’t tell you what the cotton ball was for.

If I’m remembering correctly that was also the meeting where it poured so hard the whole cafeteria we were supposed to do the training in flooded, so we couldn’t do most of the planned activities.

10. The questionable hams

I remember years ago that everyone in the office was given a ham as a Christmas gift. I was a vegetarian at the time so it wasn’t my favorite thing to receive, plus I’m fairly certain we had several Jewish employees as well.

The real kicker was that they gave us the hams in the morning, with nowhere to store them all day. They told us that it was cold enough outside that leaving them in our cars would probably keep them at a safe temperature all day. Probably.

11. The bobblehead doll

So, in the years after the dot-com bubble burst, tech companies fell on hard times. One of the largest decided to cut back on the annual Christmas gift to employees. Instead of gift cards or gourmet food baskets, they gave a bobblehead doll of the company’s notoriously arrogant founder. Quite a few of the dolls wound up in the urinals at work.

12. The ornaments

Company branded and in company color (orange!!) Christmas tree ornaments. The tree in the lobby fell over from the weight of so many employees abandoning their “gift” onto the company tree. I believe there bets on how many ornaments it would take before the fake tree collapsed!

13. The hoodies

Flashing back to when they gave every employee a mens XL windbreaker hoodie and then the leadership team thought that women were being petty when they spoke up about being given a hoodie that came down to their knees.

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