Foiled by people who don’t get it

[Quintaros]

My friend and co-worker, Pedro, hasn’t had a haircut in several years so his hair is 20+ inches long.  Our company is now into its annual fundraising drive for the United Way charity and Pedro has decided to use his long hair as an event for getting donations.

A site- wide email was sent out this afternoon saying that for every $1000 donated, Pedro would cut 1 inch of his hair.  I expected the donations to be cumulative, a $100 here a $100 there, that could add up with enough participation (there’s probably a thousand or so employees on site who received  the email challenge). 

Within 10 minutes, one of the business units’ Vice President (Joy) replied to the challenge saying she would put down the first $1000 for an inch.  As a VP she earns probably somewhere between $200-300K a year, so of course she can afford to do this but personally I find it to be a bit tacky.  There’s a lot of yes-men within our corporate culture that try to impress VPs by jumping on the bandwagon, so it is smart for her to take advantage of that and be the first to donate to get the ball rolling.  But I think she set the bar too high, so that nobody but the most senior people can afford to participate.   Sure enough, the next 4 replies were all matching $1000 bids from other business unit VPs. 

During all this, my girlfriend (Sepideh, who also works for the company) and I are exchanging an email commentary on Joy’s grandstanding. I tell Sepideh that I think it would be funny for me to reply to this chain of VP emails with a pledge of $63 for a 1/16” of Pedro’s hair.  I think this is funny but Sepideh thinks it’s absolutely hilarious and that I should actually do this. 

So I type it up and hit “reply all” to this site-wide email and am feeling pretty good about it… feeling that most people are going to get it.  But hold up, I’m not a VP.  My email privileges do not grant me permission to send an email to the site-wide distribution list.  I need to have an admin assistant send the reply out on my behalf.

So Sepideh and I are both kind of disappointed about this but she wants to stay the course.  In a way, it has the potential to enhance the joke because VPs routinely have Admin Assistants send out emails on their behalf that they could just send out themselves.  So we decide we better send our request to Bonnie, the only admin assistant with a brain in her head.  So I send out a request for Bonnie to reply to the email on my behalf with :  “Put me down for  1/16”; I ought to be good for $63.”  Sepideh and I are both thinking: “Bonnie’s cool.  She gets this.”  Shortly after I receive a reply from Bonnie saying that she’s added my contribution to the pledge form. 

That was it.  No mass email.  No high fives from co-workers.  No awareness generated in the VPs for the gulf between their salaries and mine.  At the end of this event when all of the VPs have donated their $1000, Pedro will have to cut 7 and 1/16” of his hair and it will still be over 13” long.  Hopefully, that’s short enough that he’ll stop soliciting  Sepideh to braid it for him.

[Kweepa]

Ask her to forward it "to encourage others to contribute".

[Snarky]

Maybe she was trying to protect you? Sounds like a difficult joke to carry off without coming across as an asshole (i.e. making fun of people for giving too generously by being stingy yourself, stiffing a good cause in the process). I'd check with the admin first that there haven't actually been a lot of contributions in the hundred dollar-range made without any fuss already, since none of the other non-VPs can broadcast their philanthropy over the mailing list either.

I actually think if the VPs make that much more than the rest of you, it's only appropriate that they donate an order of magnitude more. But then they shouldn't feel any more virtuous than others for it, of course. Still, all in all it's probably one of the better ways for rich people to show off.

What if you pledged $100 or so plus a 20% tip to the hairdresser?

[Ryan Timothy B]

I dunno, $63 doesn't sound stingy to me. It actually sounds quite generous. So don't feel bad.

If I were to guess, lots of people are donating, but just the average $10-20 donation that you'd normally see. Or more since the VP's donations were so damn generous.
They're only advertising the VP's donations because they're quite generous and they also just happen to be in the spotlight of the workers.

And I do agree that if the donations were all visible, I wouldn't be donating at all. I wouldn't want my VP's and coworkers to see that I was too cheap to only donate $5-10 (yes, I'm very cheap; and I find it very hard to donate my money to something I never actually see results in).
I wouldn't want to think people are saying "Let's not promote Ryan, remember when he only donated $10 for that charity?", but obviously they wouldn't (I would hope).


What you did was funny, but I can see her not wanting to email what you've donated and the "a 1/16th" saying. Since it may make her look like she's being rude because people might think she's dissing your 'small' donation. Not knowing it's actually what you wrote.

[Gilbert]

I don't know much about the culture of your company or your country, but I don't see any problem with the VP having donated "too much" money.

As with charity shows on TV (as least those large ones made annually here) it is just normal for rich/superior/whatever people to donate large sum of money, whether they do this for showing off (or so they're not embarrassed) or done so the grand sum at the very end would reach some pre-determined quantity, it's a kind of encouragement to other people to donate money. In fact this does help making more people donate, but not necessarily making most people donate more, unless for the people whose wealthy/social status are comparable to those big ones, which in such case they're under some kind of pressure or competition so that they may need to donate more money than they personally wish, and this is not a bad thing after all.

This can be easily seen by the fact that while "big" people would donate multi-million dollars, an average person would donate as little as 100 dollars or even less (NOTE: I'm talking about HKD here), as shown in the scrolling text on the bottom of the screen during such shows.

Of course, in a company the difference may not be that apparent (millions vs 100 bucks for rich vs normal people) but it's still there. Your VP, having donated $1000, did put some pressure and set a standard to people of comparative (and higher) rank to hers (which, as I mentioned, is not a bad thing) but this should not affect most of the other people, except:

There’s a lot of yes-men within our corporate culture that try to impress VPs by jumping on the bandwagon...

I'm not sure how many does "a lot of" actually means, but I think there'll still be plenty  "normal" people who won't donate unusually large sum of money. As some people already pointed out, $63 is a quite generous donation and I don't see how the 1/16 inch part could be funny. Instead, I personally find this to be rather rude as it 1. mocks the generous "big" people for donating too much and 2. mocks all the "poor" norms who donate around $10-20. I think it's actually a better idea to not let that joke in your post to pass to the mass. Maybe that admin. assistant is really smart after all.

[SSH]

In (Mainland) China when there was a recent disaster (landslide, I think) all the local employees had a mandatory "voluntary" donation automatically docked from their paychecks. They also banned all foreign TV channels for the day, because obviously watching House or True Blood when people died some days before would be in bad taste or something.

However, ANYONE who tries to make a joke on company wide email lists always looks like an idiot to at least 30% of the recipients.

Also, admin assistants are generally more awesome than you realise.

[InCreator]

However, ANYONE who tries to make a joke on company wide email lists always looks like an idiot to at least 30% of the recipients.

Seconded, though i'd put that number closer to 90%