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.
The next few days were a blur of clandestine activity. I felt like a spy in my own office. I’d arrive early and stay late, using the quiet hours to build my case. My first task was to make the source code understandable to a layperson. The jumble of functions and variables was proof to me, but it would look like gibberish to most of my colleagues, and especially to HR.
I started by taking screenshots of the most damning parts of the JavaScript file. The `applyPairingFilters()` function. The hardcoded list of names. My own name next to Ben’s, with the insulting parenthetical note. I highlighted the key lines in red, adding simple, text-box annotations: “Function to override random selection.” “List of pre-determined pairs set by administrator.” “Analyst Note: Profiling employees for gift assignment.”
Then, I went back a year. The company used a shared drive for ‘Social Committee’ activities. It was a digital graveyard of potluck sign-up sheets and blurry photos from holiday parties past. I found the folder for ‘Secret Santa 2022.’ And in it, a spreadsheet. It was the master list of participants from last year. Next to each name was the person they had been assigned.
My heart hammered against my ribs. This was the Rosetta Stone.
I cross-referenced last year’s final pairings with the logic I’d found in the code’s filter. It was a perfect match. Every single ‘priority pair’ in the code was reflected in the previous year’s results. Tara got her expensive pen from the design lead who was angling for a promotion. David from accounting got a generic box of chocolates from a remote salesperson he’d never met. It was all there, a ghost in the machine, a digital fingerprint of her long-term manipulation.
I felt a grim satisfaction as I pasted the two sets of data side-by-side into a new file. On the left, the ‘official’ assignments from 2022. On the right, the hidden code that had determined them. It wasn’t an anomaly; it was a pattern of behavior. It was a conspiracy of one.
I named the file `Project_Krampus.pptx`.
The Amazon Trail
The code was the skeleton of my argument, but the Amazon order was its heart. It was the emotional core, the part that would make people’s blood boil. The sheer, unmitigated gall of buying yourself a luxury gift and your assigned colleague a piece of cleaning equipment was a universal language of asshole that everyone would understand.
Getting that evidence was trickier. I had access to the report, but I couldn’t just screenshot the corporate finance portal. The metadata on the file would show my user ID, the time I accessed it. It would prove I had been digging. I needed the proof without the trail leading back to me.
My solution came in the form of Ben Carter, the very person I was supposed to be buying a gift for. Ben, the quiet IT kid. As part of his job, he was one of the few people who had administrative access to almost every system in the company for troubleshooting purposes.
I needed to talk to him. It was a huge risk. If he was loyal to Tara, or just a stickler for the rules, he could shut me down or, worse, report me. I had to trust my gut, and my gut told me that a kid who wore noise-canceling headphones all day was probably not a member of Tara’s fan club.
I found him in the breakroom, methodically assembling his sad turkey sandwich.
“Hey, Ben,” I said, trying to sound casual. He jumped, startled, and pulled one side of his headphones off.
“Oh. Hi, Mei,” he mumbled, not making eye contact.
“I’m your Secret Santa,” I said, deciding to get straight to it. “And I need your help with something. It’s… a bit of an unusual IT request.”
His eyes flickered up to mine, a spark of curiosity in them. I explained the situation in hushed tones, leaving out the Secret Santa part and framing it as a security concern. “I think there’s a vulnerability in how the departmental Amazon account logs are stored,” I said, choosing my words carefully. “I’m worried that unauthorized users could potentially view spending details. Could you, for auditing purposes, pull a sterile, non-user-specific log of all transactions on the marketing department’s account for the past month?”
A sterile, non-user-specific log. It was corporate jargon, but he understood immediately. He would be pulling the data as part of a hypothetical security audit. My name wouldn’t be on it. His name would, but his job description gave him the perfect cover.
He was quiet for a long moment, his eyes darting around the empty breakroom. I could see the gears turning in his head. He was smart. He knew this wasn’t just a random request.
Finally, he gave a tiny, almost imperceptible nod. “I can do that,” he said. “I’ll email you a PDF. The ticket number will be for a ‘routine security audit.’”
Relief washed over me, so potent it almost made me dizzy. “Thank you, Ben. Seriously.”
He just nodded again, put his headphones back on, and went back to his sandwich. An hour later, a PDF landed in my inbox. It was a clean, official-looking document. And on page three, there it was. The sponge, the scarf, and the winky face, all preserved in the sterile, undeniable format of a system log.
The weapon was nearly complete.
A Calculated Risk
I had the proof. The code, the historical data, the Amazon receipt. I had it all packaged neatly in my PowerPoint presentation. Now came the hardest part: deciding what to do with it.
Mark’s words echoed in my head. Burn it all to the ground.
The idea was still terrifying. This wasn’t just about Tara anymore. This was a career calculation. If it went wrong, I could be fired. I could be labeled a troublemaker, a poor culture fit, someone who couldn’t let a small thing go. I could see the HR meeting now: “Mei, while we appreciate you bringing this to our attention, the methods you used were a serious breach of company policy.”
I spent a whole evening pacing my living room, running through the scenarios.
Scenario A: I email the presentation to HR and my VP, Mr. Harrison. It’s the ‘by the book’ approach. They would likely call Tara into a private meeting. She would cry. She would deny it, call it a misunderstanding. She would say I had a personal vendetta against her. Given her relationship with Harrison, she might even get away with a slap on the wrist. The information would be buried, and I would have a powerful, vengeful enemy for the rest of my time at the company. Risk: High. Probable Outcome: Failure.
Scenario B: I do nothing. I buy Ben the gift card. I watch Tara open her self-purchased scarf and feign surprise. I unwrap my smiley-face sponge and force a laugh. I let the resentment fester inside me for another year. It was the safe option. The path of least resistance. It was also the option that made me feel sick to my stomach. Risk: Low. Probable Outcome: A slow, corrosive death of my own self-respect.
That left Scenario C: The public option. The nuclear option. Wait for the party. Wait for the gift exchange. Wait for the exact moment of her triumph, the moment she holds up that scarf for everyone to admire, and then… project my presentation onto the wall for the entire department to see.
It was insane. It was dramatic. It was career suicide.
Or was it?
The more I thought about it, the more strategic it seemed. In a private setting, Tara could control the narrative. She could lie, manipulate, and play the victim. But in a public forum, in front of fifty of our colleagues, the data would speak for itself. There would be no room for spin. The sheer, undeniable evidence, presented in the immediate aftermath of her fraudulent performance, would be a knockout blow. People wouldn’t be able to ignore it. HR wouldn’t be able to sweep it under the rug. The collective outrage would force their hand.
About the Author
