Interlude:

Another etiquette question. My work is never done.

Dear David,

A coworker of mine just bought a house and moved into it over the past weekend. A manager here in my office requested we send flowers as congratulations. I put in the order. The flowers arrived and today the coworker sent out a thank you email to the office. Well, the email went to another coworker who had also moved into a co-op apartment over a month or so ago, but we never sent her flowers. She was insulted. She made a point to complain to me that management here in our office are inconsistent with their gifts and favor some over others. I felt bad because I had known she had moved and felt like I should have remembered that. Is there something I should do to correct this? Isn’t also rude to point out when you don’t receive gifts?

David responds:
Oh dear. This is not so much a question so much about gifts as the increasingly hideous practice of applying social rules to the workplace. American employees are paid slave wages and receive draconian health insurance and vacation benefits; we have no job security or pensions, working conditions are often deplorable (cubicles!), and our every email and Internet navigation is subject to scrutiny. The corporate overlords, in an effort to make this situation appear tolerable, have decreed that offices must be warm and fuzzy places, run like families or groups of friends. But as all families and groups of friends are, by definition, highly dysfunctional—and all coworkers are immersed in the cloak-and-dagger intrigue of office politics—we end up with situations like the one described above.

If I ran an office, we would acknowledge no special days . . . not birthdays or weddings or new homes. There would be no parties of any kind, no enforced fraternization, and no motivational posters on the walls. All of the money we save from buying gifts and flowers and cards and placards that read “There is no ‘I’ in teamwork” would go toward providing better benefits and more time off with pay, so my employees would get to spend more time with their real friends and family.

And we would all call each other by our last names, Mr. or Ms.

This may sound unfeeling, but it is nothing but the sort. It is dignified, it is fair, it promotes productivity and privacy, and it does not result in hysterical accusations about who has done what to whom. In other words, it has all the characteristics of the perfect workplace, rather than the day care centers or pits of vipers that most workplaces resemble today.

My little manifesto aside, there is no real answer to your question. Your managers have a policy of acknowledging some of the milestones of some of the employees. Employees have been hurt by this in the past, and they will be in the future. Anything you attempt to correct this will have disastrous results . . . speaking to the manager about the problem, requesting that no more gifts be distributed, will make you look like the killjoy in the eyes of the entire office, and it will make the employees who were left out in the past appear to be whiners. On the other hand, attempting to single-handedly create a fairer workplace, where all personal triumphs are acknowledged, will invite the immense burden of keeping track of everyone’s private lives to fall squarely on your own shoulders . . . and then you will miss one, and you will be responsible.

There is nothing you can do to correct what has happened, and it is not a matter of rudeness. In the future, as the middleman in the situation, the best thing to do is acknowledge no culpability. If people complain to you about the policy, smile sympathetically, congratulate them heartily on their new co-op or birthday or whatever, and tell them you were just following orders. Pass the buck. Name names. If someone wants to complain, point him in the right direction—and stay out of it.