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.
I couldn’t let it go.
During my lunch break, when the office was mostly empty, I went back to the source code. The JavaScript file linked from the main page was obfuscated, a jumbled mess of characters meant to be unreadable. But obfuscation isn’t encryption. It’s a puzzle, and I’m very good at puzzles. I ran the script through a deobfuscator tool. The code unspooled on my screen, messy but legible.
And there it was. A function called `applyPairingFilters()`.
The logic was crudely elegant. It contained a hardcoded list of ‘priority pairs.’ Chloe was paired with Tara. Mark was paired with Sarah, likely because Tara knew Sarah found him annoying. And my name, Mei, was paired with Ben Carter. There was even a note next to our pairing: // M. Analyst -> B. IT (quiet/difficult) //. She had profiled us. She’d categorized me as an analyst who would systematically approach the problem of a ‘difficult’ giftee, and she was right. That was the most infuriating part.
It wasn’t just about who got the good gifts. It was a social engineering experiment on a small scale. She was testing people, rewarding her allies, and giving inconvenient tasks to those, like me, who stayed out of her orbit. We weren’t colleagues to her; we were variables in her annual equation of self-aggrandizement.
The anger was now mixed with a sense of violation. This wasn’t just a game. It was a deliberate, calculated manipulation of the people I worked with every day.
My mind started racing. What else? Where else was she sloppy? The prompt had mentioned an Amazon order history. That felt like a bigger leap. Hacking into her personal account was a line I wouldn’t cross. But then I remembered something from a budget meeting a few months ago. Tara managed the department’s miscellaneous expenses, which included all the supplies for her ‘culture’ events. She used a corporate Amazon Prime account.
Access was restricted, but as a senior analyst, I had clearance to view departmental spending reports, which included itemized logs from that very account. It was a long shot. She was probably smart enough to use her own account for the Secret Santa gifts.
I navigated through the company’s internal finance portal, my heart thumping a nervous rhythm against my ribs. I pulled up the Amazon account history for the last thirty days. It was mostly what I expected: bulk-ordered coffee pods, printer paper, a five-pound bag of fun-sized candy bars for the reception desk.
I kept scrolling.
And then I saw it. An order placed two days ago, the day after the assignments went out. The order contained two items, scheduled for delivery to our office address.
Item 1: A single, yellow dish sponge with a smiley face. Price: $2.49.
Item 2: A pashmina and silk blend scarf from a high-end designer brand I recognized from the pages of Vogue. Color: ‘Winter Iris’. Price: $350.
My blood ran cold. The $50 minimum was a guideline for the peasants, not for the queen’s tribute. But the final piece, the smoking gun, was in the delivery notes. For the sponge, it was standard: “Leave at reception.”
For the scarf, Tara had added a special instruction. A little note to herself, a detail she thought no one would ever see.
“Hold at reception for T. Mills. Gift for S.S. – from my ‘admirer’ ;)”
The winky face was a flourish of arrogance so profound it almost made me laugh. She wasn’t just rigging the game. She was buying her own trophy and writing her own winner’s speech.
Homefront and Headaches
I drove home that evening in a daze, the image of the Amazon order burned into my retinas. The smiley-face sponge. The winky-face delivery note. It was all so petty, so childish, and yet it filled me with a level of white-hot rage I hadn’t felt in years.
When I walked in the door, my husband, Mark, was in the kitchen, trying to coax our twelve-year-old son, Leo, into doing his pre-algebra homework.
“How can X be a letter and a number?” Leo wailed, dropping his pencil for the tenth time. “It’s a philosophical crisis!”
“It’s a variable, you drama queen,” Mark said, ruffling his hair. He looked up at me and his smile faded. “Whoa. Rough day?”
I dropped my bag on the floor and slumped into a kitchen chair. “You have no idea.”
I explained everything. The rigged randomizer. The hardcoded pairings. The Amazon order with the $2 sponge and the $350 scarf. The note. The goddamn winky face.
Mark listened patiently, leaning against the counter. He was an engineer, a man who saw the world in terms of systems and tolerances. “Okay, so she’s a cheat and a narcissist. We knew that. The question is, what are you going to do about it?”
“I don’t know,” I confessed, rubbing my temples. “Go to HR? My boss?”
“And say what?” he challenged gently. “That you snooped in the source code of a non-company website and then dug through corporate expense reports to prove the Secret Santa is unfair? They’ll ask you how you found it. Best case, they tell you it’s a trivial matter and to drop it. Worst case, they reprimand you for misuse of company resources.”
He was right. I was the one who had broken the rules, technically. I had used my access and my skills to uncover a wrongdoing that, on the surface, was laughably insignificant. A rigged gift exchange. Who cared?
“But it’s not insignificant!” I burst out, my voice rising. Leo looked up from his homework, startled. “It’s the principle of it, Mark. It’s this… this culture of fake bullshit she’s built. Everyone sees it, everyone knows it’s a lie, but we all have to smile and play along because she’s got the VP’s ear. She makes people feel small and stupid, and for what? For a scarf she bought herself?”
My hands were shaking. I was surprised by the venom in my own voice.
Mark came over and put a hand on my shoulder. His voice was calm and steady. “I get it. I do. So, HR is a bad option. Confronting her privately is a worse one; she’ll just lie and gaslight you. That leaves you with two choices.”
“Which are?”
“Do nothing. Buy the kid a fifty-dollar Best Buy gift card, swallow the injustice, and move on with your life.” He paused, a knowing look in his eye. “Or, you burn it all to the ground.”
The phrase hung in the air between us. Burn it all to the ground. It was a terrifying thought. It was a thrilling one. For years, I had been the quiet analyst, the one who kept her head down and did the work. I avoided office politics like the plague.
But Tara had made it personal. She had coded me into her little game as a non-player character, a predictable variable. She thought I’d just follow my programming.
Maybe it was time for a system update.
“Mom,” Leo said, his voice small. “Are you going to get in trouble?”
I looked at my son, his face a mixture of confusion and concern. I thought about the kind of world I wanted him to navigate when he was older. A world where you just let bullies and cheats win because it’s easier? Or a world where you stand up, armed with facts, and speak the truth, no matter how petty the battlefield?
“No, sweetie,” I said, my voice suddenly clear and firm. “The person who is going to get in trouble is the one who has been breaking the rules.”
Mark squeezed my shoulder. He didn’t need to say anything. He knew which choice I had made.
Forging the Weapon: The Ghost in the Machine
The decision was one thing; the execution was another. I couldn’t just stand up and shout accusations. That would be messy, unprofessional. It would be my word against hers. No, if I was going to do this, I had to do it in my own language: data. The evidence had to be clean, concise, and irrefutable.
About the Author
