Buried in the source code of the janky Secret Santa website was a single comment that made the blood freeze in my veins: // T.M. Filter v2.1 – DO NOT DELETE – For manual pairing override //.
T.M. stood for Tara Mills, our department’s self-appointed queen of morale and the architect of this annual, mandatory fun-fest.
For years, her reign of forced cheer and blatant favoritism went unchecked, a chaotic system where she always ended up with the most lavish gifts while the rest of us got novelty mugs. This wasn’t just a game; it was a deliberate, calculated manipulation of the people I worked with every day.
She made one critical error in her social engineering experiment. Tara profiled me as a quiet analyst who would simply follow the rules, a predictable variable in her equation.
What this petty tyrant didn’t count on was that my payback wouldn’t be a bad gift, but a meticulously crafted PowerPoint presentation, delivered with cold, hard data at the moment of her greatest triumph.
The First Tremor: The Gospel According to Tara
The email landed in my inbox with the digital equivalent of a thud. The subject line, written in a festive, curly font and decorated with snowman emojis, read: “IT’S THAT TIME AGAIN! 🎄🎅 Secret Santa 2023 Sign-Ups!”
My stomach did a slow, nauseous roll.
I work as a senior data analyst at Veridian Dynamics, a company that prides itself on efficiency and logic. But for one month a year, all logic evacuates the building and is replaced by the reign of Tara Mills. Tara wasn’t a manager or an executive; she was the self-appointed, and corporate-condoned, Chief Morale Officer. Her official title was Executive Assistant to the VP, but her real job was to orchestrate a never-ending parade of potlucks, birthday singalongs, and mandatory fun.
Her magnum opus was the annual Secret Santa.
“Did you see it?” Sarah from marketing murmured, rolling her chair over to my cubicle. Her face, usually bright and expressive, was pinched with the same familiar dread I felt. “She’s using that same janky ‘randomizer’ website again.”
I minimized the email, as if not seeing it would make it go away. “Of course she is. The one that looks like it was coded in 1998 on a dial-up modem.”
Tara stood near the coffee machine, holding court. She was a woman who seemed to be constructed entirely of sharp angles and expensive fabrics, her laughter a little too loud, her smile a little too wide. She was talking about the absolute necessity of a $50 minimum gift price this year, to “ensure everyone feels truly valued.” A few junior associates nodded enthusiastically, desperate to stay in her good graces. Tara’s favor could mean the difference between getting a prime vacation slot or being ‘accidentally’ left off the invite for the department’s happy hour.
I’d been at Veridian for eight years. I’d seen this play out time and again. The first year, I was optimistic. The second, skeptical. By year five, I had enough anecdotal data to form a hypothesis. Tara, the queen of office culture, always seemed to receive the most lavish, thoughtful gifts. A cashmere sweater. A designer handbag. Last year, it was a limited-edition fountain pen that cost more than my car payment. Meanwhile, people like quiet David from accounting would end up with a novelty mug, or in my case last year, a six-pack of lukewarm craft beer I couldn’t drink because I’m allergic to hops. It was a cycle of forced cheer and predictable disappointment, and Tara was the sun around which it all revolved.
“I’m telling you, it’s rigged,” Sarah whispered, her voice low. “Janine in legal got assigned her own boss last year. How is that random?”
I just sighed, pulling the email back up. The deadline to enter was Friday. Participation wasn’t mandatory, but opting out was social suicide. It meant a month of passive-aggressive comments from Tara about not being a “team player.” It meant being put on the cultural blacklist.
“Well,” I said, clicking the sign-up link with a sense of grim resignation. “Here’s to another year of feeling truly valued.”
A Loaded Deck
The email with our assignments arrived the following Monday. The sender wasn’t Tara, but a no-reply address from “Santa’s-Official-Randomizer.net.” The name itself felt like a lie. It was too earnest, too kitschy. It was pure Tara.
My heart sank as I read the name. Ben Carter.
Ben was a new hire in the IT department, a kid fresh out of college who was so painfully shy he communicated almost exclusively through Slack messages, even when you were sitting five feet away from him. I knew three things about Ben: he wore noise-canceling headphones from the moment he walked in to the moment he left, he ate the same sad turkey sandwich at his desk every day, and his favorite color was, according to his anemic employee bio, “gray.”
Buying a gift for Ben was going to be a nightmare. A $50 minimum for a person whose entire personality seemed to be a void. It was a classic Tara move. Give the difficult assignments to people who wouldn’t complain and would still follow the rules. It kept her favorites, the ones who orbited her, free to buy each other cute, easy gifts from their shared Pinterest boards.
I glanced over the cubicle wall. Sarah was staring at her screen, her brow furrowed. “I got Mark from sales,” she mouthed. I gave her a sympathetic wince. Mark’s only known hobby was talking about his CrossFit achievements.
“Who’d you get?” she asked.
“Ben in IT.”
Her eyes widened. “Oof. Good luck with that.”
Later that day, I saw Tara gliding over to Chloe, a junior graphic designer who dressed like an Instagram influencer. “Did you get your person?” Tara asked, her voice a conspiratorial whisper. Chloe nodded, a wide, genuine smile on her face. “I got you!” she stage-whispered back, and the two of them giggled and hugged.
It was so blatant it was almost comical. The randomizer had ‘randomly’ assigned Tara to her closest work sycophant, a girl who would undoubtedly spend a week’s salary on her gift. The deck wasn’t just stacked; Tara was dealing from the bottom of it in broad daylight.
That night, something about it gnawed at me more than usual. It wasn’t just the unfairness. It was the insult to my intelligence. I was a data analyst. I spent my days finding patterns, identifying anomalies, and making sense of chaos. This office charade was a chaotic system with one glaring, recurring anomaly: Tara Mills.
On a whim, I opened the assignment email again. I hovered my cursor over the link to the randomizer website. It wasn’t a standard platform like Elfster or DrawNames. It was a custom domain. My curiosity, the professional part of my brain that couldn’t leave a puzzle unsolved, began to twitch.
I clicked it. The site was as basic as I remembered, a crude cartoon Santa on a pixelated sleigh. But this time, I wasn’t just a user. I was an analyst. I right-clicked on the page and selected ‘View Page Source.’
My screen filled with lines of HTML and JavaScript. Most of it was boilerplate, simple code for a simple webpage. But buried in the mess, I saw a comment, a note left by the programmer.
// T.M. Filter v2.1 – DO NOT DELETE – For manual pairing override //
My breath caught in my throat. T.M. Tara Mills.
It was right there. Not even hidden well. A backdoor. A way to manually rig the “random” pairings. The rage I felt was cold and sharp. This wasn’t just about a silly gift exchange anymore. This was about manipulation, about a petty tyrant using a flimsy excuse of ‘morale’ to create a system of patronage and exclusion.
And I had just found the key to her kingdom.
A Whisper of Data
The next day, the code was all I could think about. The filter. The manual override. It was like an itch in my brain. Tara had built a system designed to look fair while explicitly serving her own interests. It was a microcosm of every petty corporate power play I’d ever seen, just wrapped in tinsel and glitter.
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