Love them, hate them or barely know them, it's a colleague's birthday, wedding or leaving do and there's a collection to mark the occasion. So how much should you give? And if you're the person organising the collection, how do you chase without feeling like a loan shark or exposing unspoken team dynamics?
The politics of the office whip-round are so sensitive that everyone the BBC spoke to asked us not to use their real name. For those on a tight budget, the rule is simple: only give to colleagues you've worked with directly. Lucy, a senior therapist in healthcare, says: "If we haven't worked together, my purse is staying shut." There's a blunter unspoken truth beneath the surface.
"It also depends on if I like you," she admits. "One colleague's whole demeanor annoyed me, so when she moved roles, I wanted to celebrate with my own drink - not give her money." Former music journalist Layla is similar, only contributing if she "really likes" the person. Yet she often avoids office collections on principle, not personality, disliking how impersonal they can feel.
"I'd rather buy my own gift for someone I care about. I hate having to be forced to contribute to a joint collection out of some rubbish sense of obligation," she says. The decision to give also comes with a question of how much.
Barker has a decade's worth of experience organising and contributing to various collections at a large multi-national company, where he works in research and production. He says it's normally the same half a dozen people that contribute generously, irrespective of the person or the occasion. The average a worker gave to a collection was £11.65 in the first three months of the year, according to analysis of over 5,000 contributions by website GiftRound.
Junior workers can often face the biggest dilemma. Felicity, now mid-career, remembers one horror story from her first job as a teenager. Working at a car garage aged 17, she was suddenly thrust an envelope to give money for a mechanic who was retiring.
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