Last night was a rough one for me, so I overslept (naturally) and got into work late this morning. I contemplated a sick day, but I decided against it; with cold and flu season coming, I figured I better keep something in the sick day bank, just in case.

Our bi-weekly all-staff meeting was about halfway done when I arrived, so I figured I’d just camp out at my desk to get settled in. Twenty minutes later, I received a email with just “Come down to the staff mtg [sic] please” in the subject line.

Good thing I didn’t take the sick day, I guess. The email was from our human resources director, who was to award me with a gift for seven years of service to our organization.

To say I didn’t see this coming would be an outright lie. I hit the seven year mark at the end of May, though service gifts I received in the past were preceded by a heads-up of some sort. That wasn’t the case this time, but no matter; I got staff recognition. That’s been hard to come by in my career here, as I’ve always held behind-the-scenes positions, so I often feel overlooked.

At any rate, it’s cool to know that my employer deems me trustworthy enough to get a gift that comes with a warranty.

I popped on facebook this morning to send a friend in Canada a congratulatory facebook gift. He and his partner — both American expatriates — got married this weekend.

Color me bemused when the first page of available gifts pictured above showed a gift of $100 (last one on the second row). It’ll only cost you $1, unless you purchased one of those 10-gift packs for like $6 or something, then it’ll be even less. Either way, I find some great irony in that given the current state of the American economy.

Another friend of mine sent me a facebook gift last Tuesday: a free cone commemorating this year’s Free Cone Day at Ben & Jerry’s, an event I once again missed out on mostly because my time these days is too valuable to stand in line for an hour just for a free ice cream cone. That would be like working for less than minimum wage. I did make it to my nearest scoop shop on Saturday though, to try out a new flavor introduced on Free Cone Day — Imagine Whirled Peace.

I considered the cone — and the mostly liquid lunch that proceeded it — a reward to myself fr participating in the Greater Washington Servathon as part of Team DCist. Our assignment was at Harriet Tubman Elementary School in Columbia Heights. After the lot of us were divided up into teams of 5 or 6, my group headed upstairs to a classroom to paint the lockers within it a particularly bright tint of green.

The picture doesn’t do the paint justice. I mean it was really bright.

To close out my otherwise slow day, I decided to do a little web surfing, and I came across a Miss Manners column from last October.

In it, a 60-year-old gentleman wrote:

[Men] don’t like [wedding and baby showers], and we don’t want to go to them. We all complain about it among ourselves, but none of us has the testosterone-makers to tell the women at the office to leave us off the guest list.

How do we get the message out?

Here’s a segment of Miss Manners’ response with which I wholeheartedly agree (emphasis mine):

Make it a workplace issue. The case you should make is that personal celebrations (which includes birthdays as well as marriages and births) should not be celebrated in the office. Unlike retirement or promotion parties, they do not relate to work matters and should be celebrated with friends on their own time. Colleagues who have become friends will presumably want to be involved, but those with merely a working relationship should not be conscripted.

I’m in the midst of a similar situation.