A Gift for Your Best Enemy

Admit it! There are times when you feel obliged to give somebody a gift when you really don’t want to. They may have been a real pain, yet when they leave the company, the tradition is to give everybody something.

I have wondered if I could start a company to manufacture gifts for these people who have been a burr under your saddle a bit too long. Here are a couple I have come up with.

• How about a Find Waldo book? The only difference with my version will be that Waldo will not appear on any page. They will spend hours looking for someone who doesn’t exist.
• Another is giving somebody one of those 3D art objects. They are the ones that look like nothing until you blur your eyes and then suddenly the image appears. Tell them it is something or someone they really want to see. The only difference will be that there will be no image. They will try and try to see something that doesn’t exist.
  

It doesn’t have to be that difficult. When I left one association, I was given the perfect gift to drive somebody insane. Mind you, that was not their intent. They gave me something that they thought I would really cherish, but it drove me insane. What did they give me? A pen, a very nice pen!

The problem is that I often lose pens. That’s why I love the really cheap ones. I can leave them somewhere and not consider it a great loss. This pen, on the other hand, cost quite a bit. It wasn’t a mere pen, but a writing instrument. The refills were expensive and they seemed to be needed sooner than other pens I have owned.

I remember the first time it went missing. I had driven home a few miles on a snowy, cold evening. I pulled into my driveway and noticed that my pen was missing. I guessed that it must have fallen out of my clipboard in the parking lot where I had attended a meeting. I drove all the way back and searched for about 10 minutes in the drifts that were forming. I found it.

There were similar incidents along the way, until one day I lost it for good. It was as if the weight of the world had been lifted from my shoulders. I was free from this pen that was dominating my life.

I still lose pens at an alarming rate, but somehow it doesn’t bother me when it says something like Joe’s Plumbing and Heating on it. I figure I can always go back to Joe and ask for another one. However, you can’t admit to the giver of the gift pen that you have lost it.