Every time I try to be a “team player” and attend one of these accursed company picnics, I regret it. We are currently being lobbied to attend this year’s outing, and I’m damned if I’m going through this again.
Here’s a realistic list of the festivities:
Try to find some shade in a blistering hot, airless picnic ground.
Choose from between incinerated hot dogs or dry-as-cotton chicken breasts.
Eat your lunch at a dead run to avoid the attention of meat hornets.
Explain twenty or thirty times over that you are not interested in playing softball. I’m a fifty-year-old chubby woman, do you think I’d like to play a sport against twenty-something young men? Nope. Ain’t gonna happen.
Subtly edge behind a tree while folks are watching softball, then sprint to your car and leave, turning on air conditioning full blast in hopes of circumventing heat stroke.
Yes, I’m getting crabby in my middle age, why do you ask?
Our company picnic is coming up too. I’m not sure exactly when it is because I delete the emails about it when I see the subject line. Judging by the frequency of the emails, it’s in the next three weeks or so I believe.
Anyway, I’m a grouse too. You don’t owe anyone an explaination about why you aren’t going. I guess you can use the vauge “family obligations” if you really need one. Luckily for me my boss is a good friend and a fellow grouse.
I am glad that my company has a picnic because most of the employees love it and it’s a good benefit to keep them around. I just choose not to attend.
teela, I totally sympathise with you. I am a fellow grouse. I don’t like the people I work with, so I certainly don’t want to see them socially. I HATE having to go out of my way to see them when I have to spend faaaar too much time in their presence as it is.
That said, I’m in charge of trying to set up this year’s picnic. I have a boss that thinks it makes him look great to make us all socialize. He likes to be the “big man” with all the money spending and shit. I have gone to an outside event company to make the big dream happen, but getting the bean counting managers to agree on a budget is HELL. I’ve been working on it for three months now.
I am truly resisting the urge to tell you that you have to go if only to make the poor person’s job who had to organize the damn thing worthwhile. That’s the only reason I’m hoping anybody shows up to mine.
Oh yeah…and the food will be scrumptious. This company does goood work. If these guys try to tell me that they’ll save money by having me organize the thing myself, you will soon see a thread in the pit, authored by yours truly about how I &%&ing quit. I. Am. Not. Kidding.
I dodged the bullet this year. The picnic conveniently fell during my vacation. Damn the luck.
I absolutely hate work-related social functions. I prefer to choose my friends, and while I don’t dislike my coworkers, I don’t consider many of them to be friends. Plus I work with a bunch of military folks, which means they spend way too much time sucking up to the commanding officer. And many of the civilians are as bad. No thanks.
And I don’t drink, so that kinda cuts into the biggest part of the social part of the events.
Next Friday afternoon I am hosting what passes for our “company picnic.” See, it’s not a picnic, it’s a pool party. I’ve done this every year since I had a pool put in. The good thing is it’s a fun event. We close the office at two p.m. and everybody comes out to play for a while. If people don’t want to come, then they just get to go home early. That way it’s all win-win.
Ok, so it entails me hightailing it home at noonish to ice down beer and other cold drinks, dip all the damn bugs that have decided to go swimming while I’m at work, drag out floats and stuff from the pool house and all that, but I enjoy having everybody over. We get some munchie type stuff to nosh on and pretty much just sit around. Folks are on my back porch or sitting out at the pool or floating around in the pool and generally having a good time. Heck, as long as nobody’s dripping, I don’t mind if somebody sneaks in the house for a little quality AC time.
Some people leave after a couple of hours, some may hang around til dark. People even help with the clean up which makes me happy.
Ok, having said all that, I’ll say this. We have had other events in the past where we had picnics and I hated those cause for some reason people think that there must be organized fun (games) or we’ll all just disappear or some such nonsense. What we discovered with the pool party idea is, people can sit around and talk and laugh and (gasp!) enjoy each other’s company for a while. Quelle novel!
Throw away ill-fitting, incredibly cheesey t-shirt bearing company logo that they printed up especially for the picnic. My t-shirt drawer is already bursting with crappy t-shirts that I don’t wear and I’m not going to cram another one in there.
I hate work social functions. I like the people I work with, but I already see entirely enough of them, thank you. At the end of the day, I want to go home to my daughter, not spend another three hours with my colleagues. The very few people that I care to socialize with outside of the office, I already do. I also hate contrived, organized “fun” just on principle.
I am 24 and I don’t like work social events. Sometimes a few of us that are friends go out to happy hour but to have the whole company there with all of their screaming brats of children who also don’t really want to be there is enough to make me want to stay home.
My first reaction to this was, “Pool party! Appearing in a swimsuit before work colleagues! AAAAACK!” Then I read the rest of the description and now I want to know if I can join your company.
The only positive company picnic kind of thing I’ve experienced was this kind of thing – relaxing environment and a chance to hang out and talk.
I’m of the same mind: I work with you people, I don’t want to hang out with you all the time though. It’s bad enough I have to live with you for months on end. Take, for example, the guy who doesn’t shut up . . . ever. Or the smelly guy. Or the incompetent boss. Or the office wimp who has his red Swingline stapler.
Screw you guys. My free time is just that: mine. Thus, I will not be at this Friday’s base picnic.
Tripler
And darn the luck! I have to “pack my trailer”. :smack:
Count me in for not going either. I’m not the biggest fan of the management at my work, and I can’t understand why they make the decisions they do. Mix in a bad habit of speaking my mind and I cannot hang around with management any more than absolutely necessary.
I’m extremely fortunate in that I work by myself in a satellite office in California, but my home office is in Texas. I don’t have to put up with any of that bullshit, since I’ve only been there once. It would be kind of nice if they’d send me the money they would have spent on me and I could go out and have a beer, but it’s still worth it.
I think they do an awful lot of it too. I was there exactly one time, for my interview, and they had a christmas party going on. But they took me downstairs after the interview and fed me appetizers and beer, so it wasn’t all bad. I was a captive audience anyway since I was already staying in a hotel.
I don’t like enforced socialization, either, so I am totally with you, teela. On my time off I’d like to go see my real friends. Not that coworkers aren’t nice, but I already spend enough time with them.
My company throws in great door prizes, such as gift certificates to local restaurants, NASCAR tickets (we sponsor one of the cars) and gift baskets. Everyone wants to attend the company picnic.
Yeah, those company picnics suck. Nobody likes EVERYONE they work with. Why would you want to put yourself into a social situation where you might be forced to be pleasant while having an awkward conversation with someone you don’t like?
You’ve not experienced any of the famed Teela Brown luck at these social functions?
I feel your pain. What makes it worse for me is, I’m in a quasi-management position, so I don’t have much choice - I have to go.
One of my previous companies had it down, though. They did two events every year, the obligatory Christmas bash and another summer event. The Christmas bash was completely voluntary, held at someone’s house (usually the sales manager, who had a pool, game room, big screen, and a huge collection of movies), and was very low-key. If you didn’t show, hey, you didn’t show - here’s your bonus check.
The summer event was even better. Anyone who wanted to show up got in for free to a local theme/waterpark (it has both a waterpark section and a bunch of rides and stuff), plus got good grub from the restaurant - again for free. If you didn’t show, no skin off anyone’s nose. There was no organized meeting, though - if you wanted to hang out in the waterpark all day and lounge in the pool, no big deal.
