On Owls and Caterpillars

Last night was a boring Monday night and I had nothing better to do than screw around on Facebook and browse eBay for shit that I don't need, so that's exactly what I was doing.  I often find myself in strange corners of the eBay empire, and I have no idea why but last night I wound up looking at owl-related merch.  One click just lead to another and before you can say, "hooters" I realized that I totally dig owls.

Yes, owls.

Don't look at me like that.

So, it turns out, I now dig owl collectibles.  There I was thinking to myself, "Wow, that's cute.  Oooh, I like those bookends.  Lenox makes owl figurines?  How pretty.  Hmmm, I want that."

WTF, right?  Has that ever happened to you?  You're shopping and all of a sudden your own tastes surprise the hell out of you?  It actually happens to me a lot; I'm about to make fun of something and then I realize that deep down, I think it's kind of neat.

Oddly enough, none of my Facebook friends were overly-surprised by my sudden owl fixation. I guess they're just used to me being... uhh... let's go with quirky.  Then an old friend reminded me of something I wrote on a group website many years ago, back when the OOBH was just a twinkle in my eye.  Since today's post is just a big old pile of steaming randomness, I'll tell you about the worst gift I've ever given someone.

When I first started my crap job and didn't know better, my crazy cat lady coworker convinced me that we should get our boss a birthday gift and do the whole forced-fun office cake party thing. Now, let it be known that I detest the office cake party, especially since I had only been here for a few months but had already determined that the majority of my coworkers were douchebags. However, since I like my boss and was new to the scene, I went along with it.

I gave Crazy my $10 and half-listened as she detailed some "adorable" golf-related item that she thought he'd just love to have in his office.

The day of the cake party arrived and we dragged everyone into the conference room for a half-hearted round of the birthday song and some store-bought cake. Then, with a flourish and a great deal of pomp & circumstance, Crazy unveiled the birthday gift that "we" had so lovingly picked out for him:

Ta-DAAAAAAA!

And so it was that I unwittingly gave a 55-year old man a 12" tall statue of a caterpillar playing golf.

I was mortified. He stammered and exclaimed, "Oh! Well, look at that." Everyone in the office stifled giggles and suddenly heard their phones ringing down the hall. Crazy beamed proudly. I wanted to melt into the carpet and disappear.

That was seven years ago and the caterpillar still stands on a filing cabinet in his office. Occasionally he clears out his knick-knacks (all sports-related memorabilia, some of it valuable), but I know he feels that he must display the caterpillar until the end of time because we, his adoring employees, gave it to him.

From then on out I made sure that I always take the day off on my birthday, and oddly-enough, so does my boss.

Of  course, this post begs the question:

What's the worst gift you've ever gotten and had to pretend to like?