Work Daze

If there’s one thing we’re famous for at Work Daze it’s providing insightful, useful career information about a month after it can possibly do you any good. Our New Year’s resolutions usually arrive some time in February, and our summer vacation tips invariably show up at your doorstep at the same time as the first snowflakes of winter. But this year, we’ve gotten our act together and can now provide the appropriate gift-giving advice you’ll need this year to make sure that you are both appreciated and employed next year.

This is not only darn good timing; it’s also darn essential. With the economy doing the loop-the-loop, and with economists bickering over whether the coming recession will be mild or wild, you want to do everything in your power to ingratiate your miserable self with the people in power.

Of course, you could earn the respect of management by dint of hard work but frankly, that takes too much work. Plus, you might miss the year-end fruitcake festival in marketing. But a gift – the right gift – only takes a few clicks of your mouse, and if chosen correctly, you can keep that digital creature from having to stir again into well into 2008.

I was reminded that we are in gift season by an email from Topsites-usa.com, which provides a list of web locations for that perfect “Christmas Boss Gift.” First on the list is Tiffany.com, the website of the jeweler famous for blue boxes and breakfasts.

Certainly a gift from Tiffany does assure that you will make an impression on your manager, but you do have to be careful before charging up a diamond-encrusted, sapphire-studded platinum fountain pen. A really expensive gift might tell the boss that you are making too much money, an impression that could come back to haunt you when you want your boss to use that pen to approve a big fat raise. My advice – if you want to play the Tiffany card, buy the cheapest gift you can possibly find. [The cheapest gift I could find was a key chain fob that says “Return to Tiffany’s.” Excellent gift. With any luck at all, some kind-hearted stranger will find your boss wandering the streets in a holiday stupor and ship him off to New York.]

If you’re like me and the thought of even spending $75 on your boss rankles, you will be excited to know about a gifting option based not on silver and gold, but on flour and water. That’s right, boys and girls. I’m talking corporate Christmas cookies from cookiehq.com. Once you get past a rather scary corporate logo – a giant cookie with hands, feet, and either a face full of chocolate chips or the world’s worst case of acne, Cookie HQ is chock full of fun cookie treats, including giant Christmas fortune cookies and a two-pound hunk-o-cookie formed to read “Good Job” in colorful icing.

My favorite cookie gift comes from the wide selection of “photo cookies.” These bite-sized treats are iced to depict an image of your choice – either your smiling face, or a view of your malnourished children, or how about that cell-phone photo you snapped of your boss dancing on top of a picnic table at the last summer’s company picnic wearing nothing but a leopard-skin thong.

Also in the edible area is a gift of chocolate which is available in a variety of custom shapes from namethatchocolate.com. There is a big “#1” hunk of chocolate for the boss who thinks she is, but no chocolate zero which would be a more accurate representation of your assessment. [If like so many of us, you find yourself working for a boss who is younger than you, a nice companion gift to the chocolate offering would be a tube of Clearasil.]

If none of these standard, web store-bought gifts feel right to you, it may be necessary to use your imagination to craft a gift that is just as special as your boss. A gym membership says “Hey, you’re fat,” and provides you the opportunity to bond with the boss in the steam room. A bottle of fine wine suggests that the boss’s dipsomania has not gone unnoticed. And if you’re totally out of ideas, there’s the always welcome gift of cash.

I’m not saying that you can buy your boss’s love and respect, but it never hurts to put in a down payment.