The retirement gift you can't screw up

It has happened again. Your coworker Randy—an authority in sorta retiring, and so an admirer of Brett Favre and Floyd Mayweather—has said those two words again. “That’s it,” and so he begins to bluster up and down the office, sounding off workplace grievances oh so very harsh: a napkin-less kitchen, a parking spot in the second row of the lot, a chair so old and flattened that he had resolved to stuffing the seat with napkins months ago.

It’s all show, and you know his routine beat by beat. Randy will continue to quietly work from home for a month or so, then once he has eaten up all the salted caramel and chocolate pretzels he will return to work like nothing happened. Rinse, repeat. This is certain as sunrise, but you know that you need to get a retirement gift for boss to stay happy. So you pull out that basket, the Randy Retirement Receptacle. Coworkers mutter as they drop dollar bills into the basket. You hit the internet for a quick and cheap fix, again, and you start to find a few of the newer retirement gift basket ideas for a man.

The vendor you select—the same one you have bought Randy’s last six gift baskets from, which had to create a whole new sector of customer membership to appropriately suit your spending rate—has alerted you that they have crafted a brand new basket specifically for their top client: the Randy! Devoid of all the usual fruits and instead doubled-down with the sweets. You lean back in your own napkin-filled chair, knowing that there are no better retirement gift ideas for a man like Randy than this. You’ve completely forgotten you were supposed to search retirement gift ideas for dad today.

Before you click purchase your boss appears at your desk. Lazy, derivative, uninspired, she says, as if studying a painting at a gallery. This can’t seriously be the best you can do, just buying retirement gift baskets for him time after time, she says.

What would you want me to do then, you ask, if baskets made just for Randy aren’t considered unique retirement gifts anymore.

“Add more stuff to really show your appreciation. Who knows, this may be the last one,” your boss says, as if it’s Granny Sue-Phyllis’ hundredth birthday party, and not blatant, bimonthly thievery in the workplace. You suspect your boss and Randy may be splitting the pile. Nevertheless you order the basket and think of things that show apprehension, or whatever your boss said.

Alcohol! Randy must have a choice beer or two, and nothing is more universally loved than a free case. One of the easiest retirement gift ideas for coworker.

A framed picture of you and Randy. Remember that one company retreat to Reno? You were Randy’s best man that hazy night, and you have that perfect picture from the wedding chapel! Stick it in a frame and see if Randy remembers.

You continue to conjure up memories and create ideas of what to put in a retirement gift basket, and you become so impassioned that you begin to believe this really may be the retirement gift box to end all retirement gift boxes. You remember Randy’s long lost lucky fishing lure, which you may or may not have found years ago but chose to hold on to; the recession hit us all differently, and it was the small victories that counted for you back then. You remember the shoebox of parking tickets Randy kept hidden in the ceiling tiles. You go down to the warehouse and snap a picture of that trail of shoe prints Randy made in the fresh cement on a hasty bathroom hunt.

Once more you lean back in your chair and smile. You pull a napkin from your chair and wipe away a singular tear. It’s everything, it’s the hardest you have worked in months, and it may just be enough to get Randy to actually retire. It’s so good that you decide you will hide away the gift basket you had ordered. Why sully these timeless mementos with meaningless sweets? No retirement gifts online could compare.

There is one more thing to consider. Randy always was a bit clueless, right? Not exactly the first guy you hand the stapler gun to. If this does end up being his true retirement, imagine him out in the real world afterward. Now I’m not saying he will become the pants-less old man on the local news whacking garden hedges with his cane, but it would behoove him, you, and the company if Randy received a few practical items for his silver years. A retirement survival kit, if you will.

First, you write down the retirement gift basket delivery service you use, knowing in your bones that Randy will need that. Second, you go to the bookstore and buy the last ten editions of sudoku. You keep book one open to the rules page; you aren’t sure he ever actually got those down. Third, you write down the phone numbers of Randy’s estranged sons and daughters. They may find sympathy for him in his old age, and he will need their guidance so he doesn’t forfeit his pension to any Nigerian princes. You also send his children a link to some retirement gift ideas for parents, just in case.

You skipped lunch on the orders of your boss, to focus on Randy’s gift, and you are relieved to be done. Then your boss returns from Golden Corral, with Randy, and tells you the gift basket has been utterly ruined. Old parking tickets? Sudoku? What is any of that worth? Even worse than before, she says. Try again, she says, and yanks all your hard work away, locking it in her office.

Now you are certain she’s in on this scheme, and you are fed up. You have spent the last six hours working at this, you even ordered some funny retirement gifts Ireland had. Well, no more personalized retirement gifts.

You hit the grocery store and pick up a retirement card. The worst one you can find. Japanese text and a knock-off Garfield eating spaghetti instead of lasagna. You also grab the cheapest bottle of liquor you can find. By the time of the office retirement party the bottle is half empty and in your rage you rat out your boss. Your coworkers, who had made this connection long ago, show no shock. They just didn’t want to risk their jobs over it, like you just bravely did.

In a fantastic turn of events, not only are you not fired, but your boss announces her own retirement. She must have understood that the scheme would no longer work with it being out in the open. Her final demand as boss is that you make a retirement gift basket for her now, or else she will fire you.

You can’t believe it. What kind of company have you found yourself indentured to, where you are forced to create such an agonizing amount of retirement gifts? Surely there must be some kind of workplace law against this, but your boss fired Karen from human resources when she wouldn’t contribute to the Randy Retirement Receptacle.

So you start to poke around on the internet, one last time, for retirement gift basket ideas for a woman. You are so drunk the words on the screen begin to blur and you may have just ordered fifteen Randy baskets. Forget it, you say, I’m retiring too. Forgetting in the moment that you are hardly thirty and in enormous debt, partly due to the dozens of gift baskets. You barge into the office of your boss, announce your retirement, and grab Randy’s real gift basket.

You sit back down at your desk and order yourself a wine retirement gift. It’s the least you deserve. Randy walks up and begins to weep. It was all her idea, he says, I had no choice but to do it. Her kids go to school with my kids. She knows my family. She knows where I live.

Randy is scooting across the carpet like a dog. You hand him the bottle of liquor and take a look back to your computer. You see that you had bought ten retirement wine gift baskets. You try to do the math, and conclude that you have spent over a thousand dollars today.

You stand and give Randy the real gift basket you made for him. In it is the contents of a thirty-year career, of which you realize you only scratched the surface of these past few years. You know there is much more missing, things long forgotten, and that in the end this basket amounts to a pile of junk. But Randy looks up to you with tears in his eyes. Now this, he says, this is a retirement gift. You walk out together and neither of you look back.