A “friendly” workplace. At gunpoint.
At work, we occasionally go through a management purge, where the old management is ceremonially taken out and murdered in the fields so that the computer crops will grow well next year. This is, surprisingly, a bad thing; it takes a while to train your corporate masters (and visa-versa; prima donnas like me need to use dynamite to rearrange our habits), and by the time the management and I are actually operating as a team, they're tossed out the door and a whole new set of management comes in.
The latest set of management has some bizarre habits. To encourage teambuilding with a different group of engineers that the new great leader commands, they decided to do a "retreat" for the entire staff. A "retreat" which involves going to some stupid recreation center waythefuckoutinnowhere, eating pizza, and playing paintball all afternoon. And it's not voluntary, oh no, it's a mandatory trip 40 miles out into the countryside and back. And I don't eat pizza or play paintball, so it would be a team-building exercise where I would spend the entire day sitting around hungrily twiddling my thumbs and building up a truly world-class loathing for my management team (which has cravenly buckled under the stupid orders from the top), my employer (which used to be a good place to work for, but now requires massive doses of antidepressants to even make it into the office in the morning), and the horses they rode in on.
Paintball. A team-building exercise. I already get along with my cow orkers, thank you very much, and if I wanted to engage in Soviet-style games for the amusement of Dear Leader, I'd move to goddamn North Korea. This is insulting, demeaning, and not worthy of my hire.
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Didn’t you just take that job a couple of months ago? That *really* sucks. Can you return to the job you quit in favor of this one, or has that well completely dried out?
(I may have gotten a way out of the happiness at gunpoint session. When I got home tonight, <a href=“http://weblog.pell.portland.or.us/~julie”>the best told me that she was feeling sickly and didn’t think she was well enough to do all of the baby herding tomorrow. If she’s not well enough to babyherd, she’s certainly not well enough for me to go 40 miles out to the back end of nowhere where it would take me approximately 2 hours to return to civilization. I guess they’ll have to inflict their nasty team-building exercise on me at some different time.)
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Even with Soviet paintballing, you still had a better day than me.
I got laid off this morning. Yay.