OH FUCKING HELL FIRST YOU’VE GOT TO DO SECRET SANTA

Oh for g— yeah, right, you forgot that you’ve had a small slip of paper folded up on your desk that just says "PAUL" on it for two weeks now and you’ve neglected to do anything about it. Find out who Paul is, for a start, then maybe go deeper: find out his likes and his interests, find out his loves and his hates. And so now you’re in a big winding queue at the Tesco nearby work with a £10 limit and… I mean, what do you buy someone called Paul? You’ve got an exceptionally bizarre basket here: little bottle of sparkling rosé, advent sheath of Celebrations and a… I dunno, it’s a sort of squidgy football thing. Men like football, don’t they? And squeezing things? Actually, is it a car air freshener as well? Men like those, don’t they? Pauls like their cars to smell nice?

When you get back to the office you find that you are the only person who i. doesn’t intimately know your Secret Santée and ii. hasn’t made any effort at all, with a groaning table of thoughtful gifts – a tray of hand-baked cookies, a T-shirt custom-printed with some banter, a genuinely quite fun-looking adult colouring book thing with a set of felt tips, display case of curated continental beers – and now "joke" presents (in the end you went with: a tube of six tennis balls and a watermelon? For some reason?) looks like shit. Ah, someone’s handed a gift to you, and it’s… a… wow. Someone: wow. They’ve sort of drawn this really good cartoon of you and coloured it in and framed it – really made an effort – and you’ve got all your little accoutrements here, haven’t you (the mug with your name on that you had that office-wide tantrum about when it went missing, sent all those emails, when it turns out you’d just left it on top of the photocopier; a perfectly rendered takeaway bag from the same burrito place you always go to for lunch on Treat Friday). Man. You can already envision where this is going to go on your wall. This is going to look so good there! Fuck! And… ah, you look across the room and that arty bloke from the office over is looking at his feet all shy about it. “Who’s that?” you whisper to a colleague, and they tell you with a clunk of dread: “You know Paul, don’t you?” and oh fuck, oh fuck. Oh god oh fuck. The— why tennis balls? Why now? Oh he’s opening them, he’s— ah, he’s baffled! He’s… genuinely, visibly sad! He’s… gone to the toilet to cry!

Alright, this is fine. It’s a secret, isn’t it. It’s not like everyone will spend the next hour going round the office saying, "Was it you?" to people until they’ve guessed who their Secret Santa is and then, by sheer process of elimination, Paul’s going to know that you got him a weird DVD of own goals with the 99p sticker barely scratched off and a double-ended Mars bar. This is fine. You’re fine. You’re definitely not the Office Prick.