Don't Be A Complete Tool

The back story:

A few months ago, we ran a production contest and the prize was a coupon for shopping in the company catalog.  Not a super exciting prize, but whatever.  We had fun and made our goals.

My Lead employee won (I really need to come up with a nickname for her...) and she was all jazzed about ordering a travel mug.  Seriously, seriously way jazzed about this mug.

"Carlos" does the ordering, and was actually placing an order at the time that the contest ended.  Unfortunately, he forgot the mug.  We order every 2-4 weeks to cut shipping costs, so she had to wait a little longer for her mug.

The next order, she was up his ass about that mug.  Until she saw a confirmation, she reminded him every 30 minutes that she expected her prize on the next shipment over.  It got a little annoying, but we got her taken care of.

Until we got a notice a week later that the mug was on backorder.  It's like the groundhog saw his shadow.  It was potentially 6-8 more weeks of a blizzard of bitching.  I was hoping for some good news.

Well, we got news.  News that the mug was never going to come.  Oh, shit.  Okay. . . Maybe we can find a different travel mug in the catalog.  No.  Oh, shit.

Now she's whining about how she doesn't want anything else and she feels like she got ripped off.  Oh my god, please shoot me.  It took everything for me to not shake her and tell her to just SHUT THE FUCK UP.  We're on it.

We were so on it that we start to search the internet for a goddam mug.  If we do this, we know we have to pay for it out of our own pockets, but we don't care.  We just wanted her to shut the hell up about this mug.

We finally found this personalization website.  Thank goodness.  We though it would be sweet, after all that waiting, to have the mug engraved with her name.  Then we noticed that we had 4 lines of engraving available to us, so we thought it would be funny to put a special message on there for her.  Had we known that, in the week and a half it took for the thing to get here, that MisManager was going to take everything we did and label it as harassment -- despite the lack of actual complaint -- we would have thought twice about getting it delivered to the office...

So, during this week's meeting, she announces that our completion certificate for the harassment course is due by the end of the day.  She lays out her list of acceptable and unacceptable behaviors and topics.  She made sure we all know we would get either written up or fired if she caught us violating the rules.

Ten minutes later, the mug arrives.  We were trying desperately to get the girl's attention to let her know that maybe she should wait to open it, but she made such a huge deal about finally getting her mug that a crowd formed.  So, in front of everyone, she gets her mug with her special message from all of us:

Dear (Name)
Here's your freakin' mug
Quit your bitching

She loved it!  She was laughing her ass off.  She couldn't wait to take it home and show her family.

MisManager...not so thrilled with it.  So how did I get out of the write up she wanted to give me? By pointing out:

• We ordered the mug before this whole mess started.
• We ordered the mug on our own time.
• We used our own money.

I escaped impending doom, but the sweet mug was thereafter banished from the office.  Bummer.