paying for co-worker marrige

[Ashaela]

Here at my job, there are collections for group gifts sometimes - the occasional wedding or anticipated baby, that sort of thing, to buy a gift card for the honoree. It only comes up a couple of times a year, and we pass around a manila envelope with a copy of the phone directory for the department taped to the front; once you have touched the envelope, you cross your name off and pass it to the next person. No one's counting who put money in, or how much; you can mark your name off and pass it along without adding anything, if you want to, and no one would ever know if one person put in 4 dollars, or 4 people each put in one dollar. If someone started walking around with the envelope shaking it at people for a donation, they would get my back up really quick.

[Amina516]

If I dont like ya, no money from me.

Thats basically it.

And even then, theyre only getting $5 max.

Im a cheap-0.

[MoonCat]

If you have a large workplace, this kind of thing could really add up. Hardly a week would go by without a wedding, baby, funeral, etc.

One of my now-retired co-workers never kept the money when she was the recipient. It always went to charity, especially if the reason for the collection was a death in the family.

[Irving Patrick Freleigh]

At da swamp, whenever we take up a collection for somebody's who's retiring (the only reason we seem to take up collections), you get to sign the card if you contribute something.

Of course then, the thank-you card from the recipient, personally addressed to everybody who contributed and signed, gets put up on the bulletin board in the breakroom, so everybody can see who donated.

I'll contribute money for gifts for people I like and am going to miss, and not contribute for people I'm happy to see gone. A situation as described in the OP probably would not happen at my store, even though we are a pretty close-knit bunch with a lot of old-timers still hanging around.

Make it a penny.

A little while back, we had someone in our personnel team retire. I was in a fair old dispute with them at the time and I refused to contribute. You know it's effective when a member of their team suddenly starts when you say, "No". My main reason, though, was because she was fucking incompetent.

This reminds me of a joke I saw in an old Mad magazine and have done in the past:

Somebody goes around collecting money from everybody for...something, and encourages everybody to give until it hurts. I chip in a penny. When they tell me to give until it hurts, I tell them I have a low threshold for pain.

[BarbieGirl]

I'm not a big fan of the collection pots either. I can kinda understand if it's a somewhat small workplace where everyone is on good terms with each other and it's more like an extended family. But the big huge places it would be a nightmare getting a collection for everyone, and people are sure to be left out. Case in point, Where I worked there was a gal who was a few months ahead of me when preggo, and another that had one about a year before me. And a couple a few months behind me. But the first two gals they got pots going and bought both of them nice stuff but they didn't do anything else for the rest of us that were preggo. I wasn't expecting anything so wasn't hurt by it but it did perturb me how blatantly unfair it was.