Work gifts
Buying novelty socks for people you work with
The office is where most of these get given and it is also where the jokes go wrong. A short guide to the price cap, the relationship problem and the designs to avoid.
Novelty socks exist commercially because of the office gift. Secret Santa runs on a ten or fifteen dollar cap, leaving gifts run on whatever eleven people put in an envelope, and appreciation weeks for nurses and teachers run on a group order placed by one exhausted person. Socks clear all three budgets and take no wrapping.
They also carry a risk that a mug does not. A sock with words on it says something in the giver voice, and the same sentence lands differently from a spouse and from somebody in accounts payable.
The relationship test
Before buying a text design, read the saying and ask whether you would say that sentence out loud to the person at their desk. If the answer is no, the sock is for a different recipient. This one test removes most of the bad outcomes.
Anything about the person body, their drinking, their marriage or how much they want to leave the job fails that test for a coworker even when it would be funny from a friend. The catalog does not sort by this and the listings will not warn you.
What works at work
- The profession itself: a nurse design for a nurse, an engineer design for an engineer, which reads as recognition rather than a joke about them
- A hobby everyone already knows about, since the office golfer has already told you they golf
- Food and coffee prints, which are the most neutral things in this catalog
- Animals, for the same reason
- Milestone designs for retirement or a qualification, where the occasion carries the gift
What to leave alone
Age jokes. A sock that says something about being old is a coin flip with anyone over forty who did not invite the joke, and the milestone birthday designs in this catalog are specific enough to be memorable in the wrong way.
Anything on the sole that a colleague would only see if the person put their feet up in the office. That is a private joke design and it is being given in a room full of people, which is the mismatch that produces a long silence.
The group order problem
Buying eleven pairs for a team means eleven different foot sizes you do not know. The safe move is a single design in the widest range available, given to everybody, so the gift reads as a team thing rather than as eleven individual guesses. It also stops the comparison where one person got the good sock.
Grip socks for people on their feet
For hospital staff specifically, the non-slip pairs in the medical designs are the ones with a practical argument behind them. A printed sock without grip is a slip hazard on ward vinyl and gets left in the drawer. The spec on each page says which pairs have the silicone.