Last Thursday was Psychologist Day as well as Bastille Day. I advised my coworkers to not be alarmed if I and our psychology resident stormed the barricades because we weren’t getting the guillotine out until next week. Only a couple of my coworkers knew what Bastille Day was or what I was talking about.
In honor of Psychologist Day, a Ukrainian coworker gave me a china plate emblazoned with pysanki. It was a lovely gift and much appreciated. I can use it. I am perplexed, though, about the gift from our psychometrist.
My Human Service Center and the Center in Bismarck, where Husband works share the services of a go-getting and spunky young woman who administers and scores our psychological tests. She is very efficient and works quickly. She is also very impulsive, and professes to know nothing about plants. In honor of Psychologist Day she bought large, potted fig trees for each of the four psychologists she works with. She hoped we could keep the trees in our offices. These trees need bright light. I am the only one with a window in my office. Husband brought our two trees home from Bismarck on Wednesday and they are sitting on our kitchen counter for the time being until I can get them to my office. There they will sit on a table by my window along with a large potted rosemary plant. I can’t use the table for much of anything now. It is covered in plants. I don’t want to crush the exuberance of our psychometrist, so I will do my best to keep these trees going. I know that when she drives out to my Center she will want to see how they are doing, so I don’t feel that I can give them away, either.
What is the oddest or most awkward gift you ever received? Who is the most impulsive person you ever worked with? Any advice on how to grow Fiddle Leaf Fig Trees?
Trail Baboon 
Play them violin music. That’s obvious.
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Like.
(I hope that’s Clyde.)
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I put the fig trees out on our front steps over the weekend and the heat nearly killed them. I thought they would like it hit, but I guess not.
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The oddest wedding gift we got was a set of two pillow cases that had rosmalled designs in fabric paint that said “This is the day the Lord has made”. We got them from a really Norwegian friend of my mom.
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I’ve had LARGE gifts before, like the time my dad gifted Wasband and me with the balance I owed him on my first VW Van for a wedding present. Large is not necessarily problematic..
Plants are among the most awkward, and even flowers can be untimely, at any rate, if they arrive with a dinner guest when you’re already up to your armpits in getting dinner on the table, and then have to find a vase to put the flowers in, etc.
Will have to think on an impulsive colleague…
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My maternal grandmother gave me weird books as gifts when I was in HS and college. One was called “The Way,” which was sort of a casual language Bible. I read it. Meh. Not a religious guy. And I got some other novels that were pretty mediocre by authors I’d never heard of. I recall them as being romances of some sort but not racy in the least. Very prim and proper and old-style writing.
Grandma meant well, but she wasn’t very well tuned in to what a teenage boy liked to read back in the 1970s.
Chris in Owatonna
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My sister-in-law is one of those people that believes that handmade gifts show more love than store bought stuff. (She also eats pancakes with only creamy peanut butter on them…so, there you go.) So, when I graduated from college, for my birthday, she sent me 3 pieces of paper with my name, address, and contact info at the top for me to use as ‘resume and cover letter stationary.’ Of course, she only had an old dot-matrix printer and she had folded the pages into quarters, so it would fit into the birthday card. Planning skills were not her forte’ at the time….
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This really made me LOL!
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I remember when I was a teenager an aunt and uncle gave me a set of nail clippers in a faux leather case one Christmas. Hard to be authentically appreciative about a gift like that.
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Just what you wanted! 😉
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The funny thing is that, of all the gifts I may have received half a century ago that’s the one I remember.
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WP has gone completely off the rails! This morning I got three different email notifications of “[New Post]” from Trail Baboon. The first two featured old posts from April 30 and Jul 19 (both written by vs and with no indication of year), but when I clicked on them to comment, I got the message “Not Found. It looks like nothing was found at this location. Maybe try a search?”. The third notification was of today’s actual post by Renee. Is anyone else experiencing similar issues?
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Yes, I got those too, PJ. I still have to sign in to post each comment, am not able to Like anything – I’d think it was my computer acting up if it wasn’t for your similar experience.
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We had trouble posting today’s blog, as WP didn’t like VS trying to do it with her phone. I jumped in and it took several trial and error attempts to get it to work, hence all the double posts.
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This really made me LOL!
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In Robin’s family, we have a long tradition of a circulating gag gift at Christmas. The original gift was an LP of Moog “Switched on Bach”. The challenge was to package the gift so that the recipient wouldn’t know he or she had been chosen until they unwrapped it. At some point the assumption was made that nobody was really going to play the thing and that allowed us to warm the disk and reshape it—roll it into a cylinder, etc. Somewhere along the line the Moog disappeared. Then there was a fish necktie. Them most recent circulating gift is an unskilled handblown glass carafe in the shape of a clown. It really is quite breathtaking.
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I had a copy of the “Switched on Bach.” Might still be in the collection of LPs tim inherited from me.
Gag gifts can be a lot of fun, as witnessed at the gift exchange at vs’s Solstice Party. They can also be really disappointing if the giver is inclined to just hand off any old piece of junk. I’ve been the recipient of both.
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LOL, I can almost picture it. We did something similar with a very strange picture taken from some magazine ad, that kept getting re-framed and showed up as a gag gift for years, then was replaced by an even stranger one. There are priceless photos of people receiving these, sometimes with a caption like “Why me?”
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The oddest wedding gift husband and I received was an old, tarnished brass floor lamp. It had no lampshade, and the electrical cord was frayed to the point where bare wires were exposed in places. I suspect the giver had retrieved it from some back alley where someone had abandoned it as a hopeless restoration project. Of course, it wasn’t wrapped, didn’t even have a bow on it. The funny thing is, it was a gift from an ex-boyfriend (who passed away several years ago). What a way to be remembered.
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The perfect metaphoric gift.
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Snort!
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I’m having a hard time thinking of impulsive coworkers. That, of course, doesn’t mean there haven’t been any, but in my experience, compulsive or inflexible coworkers were a lot more problematic.
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i got oven mitts with his and her sexual organs attached to the backside
never used them
they were given anonymously and i never figured out who the sicko was
impulsive there were a few i didn’t work with long but had one memorable one who would call at wee hours to talk sales strategy
he paid me a bunch of money so i listened until i couldn’t anymore
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Where did the day go, Baboons?
When I was married the first time in 1975 I had 9 wedding showers. It was ridiculously overwhelming. Attending many of these showers were dear, sweet little old ladies of limited means, who crocheted. And for us they crocheted grape clusters to be used as hot pads for the counter top, and inside the purple yarn “grapes” were bottle caps. We must have received a dozen of these.
Then at the family gag gift exchange was the Bonanza cast CD. It included Loren Green (Pa) talk/singing Silent Night, and lots of whooping in the background of the fiddle tunes. We would roar with laughter listening to the tunes, but no tune lasted long until we fast forwarded to the next one.
Impulsive coworkers? Yes, indeed. There was the admin assistant who attended the Sturgis motorcycle rally and proudly showed the pictures of nude motorcyclists, including herself, around the office. Then there were the several psychologists who slept with clients (never a good idea). They got jail time and lost their licenses. And the sanitary engineer who just wanted to spend one last free night with me two days before he got married. I said no. NO. That goes in the “sexual harassment” column, as well as the “Impulse Control Problem” column.
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I once had a co-worker who claimed her purse was stolen from the office. There was a collection taken to help her out. It turned out she had a substance abuse problem, and the theft was staged. She wasn’t there much longer, but I don’t recall if she left on her own or was fired.
I haven’t received any really odd gifts that I remember off the top of my head. However, I read that someone once left a baby on Dolly Parton’s doorstep. The baby was in a box with a card that read “Jolene”, presumably named after Dolly’s big hit. She called the Department of Health and Human Services. Maybe she would have kept a fig tree.
Have you named your fig trees? One could be Jolene. Or you could name them after famous fiddle players…
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Nice.
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