Stereotypes aside, a bottle of cognac and chocolate cake is pretty good as far as office birthdays go.
Yup.
If someone got you a bottle of liquor you probably have drank with them or spoken about it… it’s not difficult to assume someone said oh he likes this lets get it for him. Further this is a pretty common brand and has a good chance of getting picked in general.
The speed at which people assume the worst and get offended recently needs to get dialed back… a lot. If I wanted to slight a dude I wouldn’t spend money to do it.
Your entire argument depends on the fact that this dude Hennessy with his co-workers or talked about.
A fact which (as far as I can tell) you just made up.
That’s sort of the point. There is minimal context on the image so we are left to extrapolate from what we can see.
I see a nice office setting with a fairly dressed down couple of people who seem reasonably at ease in the space. It is a chocolate cake which is the typical go-to in most situations and appears to be store bought. Depending on where you live you can get liquor in the store or at a small store nearby. Some of the largest displays and most well known brands are Makers, Crown, and Hennessy. These are typically larger displays where even if you knew nothing about liquor you could probably pick one of those 3… and of those crown comes in packaging which would be a pain to take apart if you were just looking for a quick better than a birthday card gift.
…So assuming they knew fuck all about him there’s still a coin flip it would have been Hennessy. As far as the cake goes probably better than 60-70%. So hanlons razor: did someone just blow 70 bucks for a cake and booze to take a cheap shot at the guy? I doubt it.
I’ve worked in a lot of offices and I can tell you most people won’t go out of their way to get you a gift on your birthday outside of maybe a gift card from a boss. I see no malice here. Am I making assumptions? Sure. It’s an image and I provided my take on it. What was yours again?


