Office parties

[quislibet]

I am, thankfully, an outsider to corporate culture, except for a brief stint in the exciting world of temping. My ignorance, however, will -- alas! -- serve me in poor stead when I run a LARP later this summer.

So I ask you, dear reader: What happens at your office parties? (Include, say, team-building retreats and so forth.) What do you suppose would happen at an EVIL office party?

Comments

[ex-sjc.livejournal.com]

I think the most overriding disturbing quality of an office part is seeing people, whom you have always seen in a professional, constrained role, suddenly shitfaced and trying to make out with everyone else. The boundaries get dropped, and people who are just coworkers are encouraged to let their monsters from the id spill out and let it all hang out. It's quite disturbing to see the quiet project manager vomiting her tiny guts out because she had too much bad wine.

Also, there's the forced-fun aspect. We're all cheery! I think the most surreal office party -- well, okay, this was on a much smaller scale, since there were only 11 of us, but we went to a restaurant, had a big ol' mess of food, and that's when the owners of the small design firm decided to tell us that they had sold the company. It's...those sorts of things just happen. Business bizarrely contrasted with the false forced cheer of having to party with people whom you don't actually care for.

[quislibet.livejournal.com]

Yeah, those are both things I'd like to get across, but it will be hard with a one-shot where there isn't the real background of working with people all the time. Alas.

[exquiscadavre.livejournal.com]

The horror of the office party is that one is encouraged via peer pressure and booze to relax and share, while knowing that it would be politically hazardous to do any such thing, because any info about yourself you might drop will be remembered and used against you.

I think an evil office party would increase both of these forces. The punch would be spiked with things that drop inhibitions like nobody's business ,and people would nevertheless know that one wrong move could end in torture, madness, and death.

[quislibet.livejournal.com]

I think an evil office party would increase both of these forces.

Indeed! Thanks.

Post-its and colored dots

[elainegrey.livejournal.com]

In those team building retreats et cetera a theme seems to be covering the walls with flip chart paper, using post-its to put up comments, and then being allocated a certain number of colored dots to vote on the post-its.

I think at an EVIL office party there would be terribly complicated voting rules and horrible things would happen if you didn't use your dots or post-its correctly. I also assume cheating would be encouraged. I assume the possibilities would include voting on plans to take over the world, identifying trends in good and evil, selecting good assassination targets, voting on the employees most likely to succeed in achieving the evil quota, ad nauseum.

Obligatory Latin query: What's the Latin for "post-it?"

[alonewiththemoon]

When I worked in a corporate office, we had one party where we entered the conference room only to find it full of brightly colored string, as though deranged spiders on psychedelics had been through. We were each instructed to choose a string, and then everybody had to untangle the strings, helping each other along the way. At the end of the strings, we each found a little keyring-sized Swiss Army knife, the message being I suppose that one should brainstorm about the right tools for starting a job, or something like that. I had wanted to suggest scissors at the very beginning, but my reputation as a team player was already in jeopardy, so I didn't.

I suppose if this had been an EVIL office party, the strings would in fact have been webs strung by deranged spiders, the knives would have been for ritual bloodletting to demonstrate our loyalty to the EVIL company, and I most certainly would have gone for the scissors right off the bat without caring about being a team player.

[julishka.livejournal.com]

i would think that the knife symbolized (in the actual event) that sometimes the most obvious answer is buried in the vein of teamwork. speak up!

hehe.

[exquiscadavre.livejournal.com]

Oh! I was at an evil team-building retreat once.

Our manager took us to Vail on the off season. The first night, we all went on a big high altitude bar hop, with the booze paid for by management.

Early the next morning, we all woke up with killer hangovers, only to learn we were going white water rafting and our lives would depend on each other's alertness.

Now, that's evil!

[urban-homestead.livejournal.com]

You might like to read Connie Willis' Bellwether, which among other things ruthlessly parodies the worst excesses of corporate "culture". I think it would be most inspirational for the LARP you mention, and in addition is terrific fun on its own merits.

[quislibet.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the recommendation!

[wsmith.livejournal.com]

The ones I've been to have ranged from the in-th-office variety where basically everyone had to smile and try to stay politic while getting smasshed. At those there were always some people that came with agendas of their own, and management always viewed them as important morale and team-building experiences. The next type is the modest-off-site-affair. We had one of those at Tufts. We went off to a barbecue. My team promptly went off on its own and tried very hard to ignore everyone else. I would make occasional policitcally-motivated forays into the main morass of the party, but basically we spent the time talking among ourselves (the only functional team present.) The last type, which I've not attended in several years, was the Big-Budget-Multi-Office-Party. The best of those that I've been to was the annual christmas party thrown by the Gannette News Network. They rented Union Station in DC, had six bands, 8 different nationalities of food cooked to order, and 15 open bars. At that one, it was so big that politics were mostly not present. Anyway, that's my experience, such as it is.

[maartexx.livejournal.com]

It depends on the occasion. My favorites were always the wedding showers for guys, where we would make them wear a ball and chain, quiz them about kitchen utensils, etc. We also had a fairly hysterical white elephant exchange party with some kind of complicated dice game added to it.

We never had to build teams at our parties, but for those team-togetherness things we did stuff like go canoeing, get drunk on a chartered bus and go to a ball game, have cutthroat bowling and cutthroat Trivial Pursuit simultaneously while drinking terrible beer, and always lots of artery-clogging foodstuffs.

But this is the small-town Midwest, and that's why I love it. Of course, I nearly got sacked for refusing to go on the beer-bus trip.

[annablume.livejournal.com]

All office parties are evil office parties. Too much drinking, too much making out, too many hungover team building exercises.

I think the basic idea is that it's harder to hate your boss after you've passed out in the gutter together.

Or maybe that's was just me...

Flip charts. There HAVE to be flip charts.

[whatifoundthere.livejournal.com]

Normally I would suggest making fun of those ubiquitous motivational posters with pictures of eagles and ponds and skiers and suchlike, but someone beat me to it (http://www.despair.com/indem.html).

Re: Flip charts. There HAVE to be flip charts.

[quislibet.livejournal.com]

I've always liked those. I think the originals are much more evil, though.

Re: Flip charts. There HAVE to be flip charts.

[cnoocy]

Though an evil office would get to use them non-ironcally.