Every October, my company does a Halloween costume contest. It’s a whole production: the office gets decorated, there’s a catered lunch, and the grand prize is $500 cash plus an extra PTO day. People take it seriously. Last year someone built a working Iron Throne out of cardboard and won. The bar is high, and I respect that.
This year, I decided to go all in. I’m a marketing coordinator, decent with a glue gun, and I gave myself three weeks to build a vintage circus ringmaster costume from scratch: a deep red tailcoat I tailored myself from a thrift-store blazer, gold epaulettes I made from curtain trim, a top hat I rebuilt with a wider brim, and — my pièce de résistance — an LED-lined jacket interior that lit up like a marquee when I opened the coat. Total cost: about $120 and roughly 40 hours of my life. I documented the whole build in photos because I was proud of it.
Here’s where I made my fatal mistake: I kept the in-progress photos in a folder on my desk, and I posted a couple of “sneak peek” shots in our team’s Slack channel. Nothing secret — just me being excited. Big mistake.
Enter Jake from sales. Jake is the guy who reheats fish in the office microwave. Jake is the guy who “circle-backs” on things that were never circled in the first place. Two days before the contest, Jake stopped by my desk, looked at my coat laid out for final fitting, and said, “Whoa, ringmaster, cool. I’m doing something totally different though.” He was lying through his teeth.
Contest day. I walked in at 8:45 AM in my full ringmaster regalia, LEDs glowing, feeling like a million bucks. At 9:15, Jake walked in wearing a ringmaster costume. Red tailcoat. Gold epaulettes. Top hat. He had even copied my “STEP RIGHT UP” sash — the exact phrasing I’d posted in Slack. His was clearly a rush job: an off-the-rack costume with iron-on trim, the sash printed at a FedEx at midnight (the ink was still tacky; I checked). But from ten feet away, in a crowded office, we looked like a matched set.
I laughed it off at first. What else do you do? But then the judging happened, and that’s when it stopped being funny.
The contest is decided 50% by an exec panel and 50% by crowd vote. The exec panel was split between me and the Iron Throne guy from last year (he’d built a full-size Among Us crewmate this time, it was incredible). The crowd vote is where Jake killed me: the entire sales department — all fourteen of them — voted as a bloc for Jake. They’d clearly coordinated it in their team chat that morning. Jake won the crowd vote in a landslide, which tipped the total. He took the $500 and the PTO day. He thanked “the team” in his acceptance speech and winked at me. HE WINKED AT ME.
I went to HR that afternoon. I brought receipts: timestamped photos of my build process going back three weeks, fabric store receipts, the Slack messages where I’d posted my design first, and a side-by-side photo showing his sash used my exact wording. I was calm. I was professional. I said I believed the contest had been compromised by vote-stacking and that my design had been copied.
HR’s response, paraphrased: “Costumes aren’t intellectual property. The crowd vote is the crowd vote. We’re going to let this one go.”
I pushed back — politely — and asked whether coordinating a bloc vote violated the spirit of the contest. The HR rep’s face changed. She said my “tone” was concerning and that confronting Jake at the party (I’d asked him, in front of two witnesses, where he got the idea — he’d said “the internet”) could be seen as “creating a hostile work environment.”
Three days later I was called back in and handed a written warning. For “unprofessional conduct related to the Halloween event.” It’s in my file now. A written warning, because my coworker stole my costume and I complained about it.
My manager, to her credit, pulled me aside afterward and said, quietly, “That was wrong, and everyone knows it. I’m sorry. My hands are tied.” She’s been great otherwise, so I believe her.
Here’s the update, and it’s the only reason I’m not currently rage-applying to jobs from the parking lot: the CEO’s executive assistant had seen my build photos in Slack weeks ago. On Monday, she forwarded the whole thread — with timestamps — to the CEO, with a note saying the contest outcome “didn’t reflect the company’s values.” By Wednesday, two things happened: HR quietly rescinded my written warning (“upon further review”), and the company announced that next year’s contest will have a “craftsmanship” category judged solely on original construction, with the crowd vote capped per department.
Jake kept the $500. Of course he did. But he also kept something else: a nickname. Someone in engineering made a Slack emoji of his face with the caption “costume thief,” and it gets used every time he takes credit for anything in a meeting now. Which is, conservatively, four times a day.
Was I wrong to go to HR? Part of me wishes I’d just let it go and enjoyed my LED coat. But then I remember the wink, and I’m glad there’s a paper trail — even a rescinded one — that says what happened.
Anyway. If your office does a Halloween contest: watermark your build photos, keep your designs off Slack, and never trust a man who reheats fish in the office microwave.
More Halloween drama: If office costume contests bring out the worst in people, wait until you read about my sister, who wore a white wedding dress to my Halloween wedding and then caught the bouquet. You can also watch this story as a web story, or catch my sister’s wedding drama as a web story.