Inviting coworkers

I Want Cake

Hi, everyone.  I know this has come up before, but I wanted to ask everyone's advice about who to invite from work.  I work in a gigantic office of nearly 200 people, and there are several people who regularly ask me about how my planning is coming along.  I've been trying to make a policy of not talking about it unless people bring it up, so I'm not broadcasting it to anyone who doesn't want to hear, which still happens because cubicle walls aren't exactly sound-proof.

My question is, should I invite all these people who seem really interested and ask for updates frequently?  There are already some coworkers I'm going to invite (5 or 6 people plus their dates) because we're pretty friendly and work closely together, but I don't want to offend others who've taken an interest and might be a little miffed if they see other coworkers were invited but not them (could be 4-5 others, plus dates).  I'm pretty friendly with most of these people, but I don't want the guest list to get out of hand because I don't want to offend anyone.  For each couple that comes, it costs us roughly $80, and I don't know if we can afford another several hundred dollars just to not offend anyone who might not even care in the first place.

Any advice?

tpender13

I work in a huge dept too, so I kinda know what you're dealing with. FI and I decided originally that we weren't going to invite work friends at all. Then we found out that we were getting money from our parents that we weren't really expecting, plus we got more declines than we thought we would. We decided to take a crap on etiquette and hand closer work friends invites this week. None of them were offended. I invited three people, plus SO's for the two in relationships. It was an obvious choice who to invite for me though, as these three people and I have been working closely together for quite some time.

I just asked them to not advertise the fact that they were coming. I mean, not lie about it, just not make it a point to talk about it at work. I would just invite the people that you are close too, and maybe send them an email asking them not to tell everyone that they were invited.

acw016

I've got this problem too.. Big office and it's been sooo hard trying to figure out which people to invite and which to leave off the guest list.. I've decided to just invite those I feel I'm closest to and send them an email to basically keep it on the down low since I couldn't invite everyone... Hoping that works out & no one is offended.. Nothing else we can really do though, can't invite the whole office!!