If you are injured doing these inane excercises, there must surely be grounds for a lawsuit against the company for making this stupid stuff compulsory and not ensuring that the risks were proeprly controlled.
We do these sort of activites where I kayak for kids, but the spider’s web is 5 foot max and there are always a couple of instructors around to help the kids, we’ve had no injuries in the 6 years I’ve been there, but I do think the type of web described by the OP is totally over the top, anything that has anything above a vague risk of injury just shouldn’t be done, especially not, like our web, to children.
(The kids always seem to quite enjoy the web to be honest)
I take it none of you have watched “Made in Canada”. Basically it is a show about a poor working environemnt. Anyway, one day they do one of these retreats, and everybody hated it. And so the punch line to the show was at the very end, they are sitting in a room complaining, and one character asks another character a name of a company that was bothering/courting her. So the first character calls up that company and reccommeds the retreat that they had gone on.
**
So you see what you all have to do. Call up other companies, and recommend your retreat activities to them! Spread the pain around. Revenge is a dish best served often!**
Too bad the CBC doesn’t play “Made in Canada” anymore.
The ironic thing, to me, is that these team-building exercises do end up fostering a group identity, though not at all for the reason intended.
See, instead of joining in the warm fuzzies of accomplishing something as a group, you’re actually united by your unbridled loathing of jerks like Sadistic Dwight and his asinine activity list.
In a darkly humorous way, I guess it’s sort of like being in a POW camp in Vietnam. You’d never do it voluntarily, but the bonds last for a lifetime.
or :rolleyes:, you choose. Maybe some of both.
One of my fonder memories of freshman orientation in college was when they made us do the no-talking lining up by birthday thing, only without the blindfolds. The emcee gave a count of three, upon which nearly everyone on the entire athletic field took out their wallet and proceeded to line up according to the birth date on their driver’s license. They really should’ve known better than to try that with engineering students (or, really, anyone over the age of 5).
On a more serious note, I’ve experienced all of the abominable bullshit described in this thread, thanks entirely to a truly awful seventh-grade English (and homeroom) teacher who fancied herself an expert on psychology. This was the same one who used to encourage twice weekly “class discussion” periods, which were in reality teacher-sanctioned junior high school gossip/insult sessions, most often at my expense.
In about April of 7th grade, she guilt-tripped everyone in my class into spending a weekend at a camp that was actually devoted specifically to this huggy-feely crap. They had the spiderweb, a log we had to cross, the trust falls, some sort of climbing thing, a zip line, and a lot of other stuff I’ve probably repressed. Oh, and I remember that everyone had to pick a “personal challenge” for the weekend that they had to work on - good answers were things like building more trust in one’s classmates, or learning about empathy, or more mundane things like conquering one’s fear of heights. (My main challenge was not letting fly with explosive diarrhea while hanging from the zip-line, thanks to a fairly nasty case of food poisoning I caught the first night.) I won’t get into the details, and frankly I’ve tried to forget most of them anyway, but let’s just say that I did NOT want to be there.
This remains one of the most monumentally dumb things I’ve ever had to put up with, and it still makes me a little bit angry, even 15 years later, to think about it. And it still just GALLS me to think about that accursed woman, because, you see, after spending most of a school year fostering conflict and bitter hatred through those damned class discussions, her idea of “fixing” the problem was to pack us all off to this camp, at our expense no less. If I had a time machine, one of the top ten things I’d do is go back in time and say something to that woman. Something containing words like “piehole” and “know-nothing sack of shit.”
You mean you didn’t do the fall off the platform backwards into the arms of your team thing? The scale the big wall exercise? You’re lucky, guy. I was a manager when I had to do this in the early '70s, and I’ve got the video tape and kerchief to prove it. Oddly, when I moved out to Silicon Valley and worked on teams with real goals, no one ever thought this was needed anymore.
But, as usual Dilbert says it best (I have this one up on my wall)
We had a freshman orientation “thing” once. I skipped the whole thing and nothing bad ever happened. Afterwards, the “kids” (I was the Old Guy, in my 20s, fresh out of the military) were telling me about the scary creepy snake they HAD to handle. I laughted out loud - I had just come back from Panama, where they have real snakes (bushmasters and fer de lances) 
But again, I had skipped out on the orientation, nothing happened to me, and no one even bothered asking me why I hadn’t been there.
I’ve done a couple of these in my time. One of them, when I was about 16, actually did lead to some bonding. See, one guy in our group got very dehydrated as a result of doing all these damned activities in the hot sun, so when we skipped some dance-type activity to see him, it helpd develop some real group closeness. :smack: Of course, that’s not exactly how these things are supposed to work. Maybe it would be more effective if they divided people into teams and then severely injured one team members…
I live by the words of a friend, regarding trust exercises: “I trust myself not to fucking fall.”
The latest team-building nonsense served up to us by consultants involved building a mini-golf course with construction paper and plastic toys. It was actually more or less fun, up until the part where they asked us to reflect on what lessons we’d learned that related to our department, and everyone went silent and boggled at them. We learned how to make a mini-golf course with construction paper. That seemed to be about all.
Weird piece of synchronicity here. I wrote a review of a movie called “Demonlover” about a week ago. It’s about a corporate spy who’s spying on a giant French corporation, who discovers too late that the company is deeply involved with a BDSM site called “The Hellfire Club.” She discovers that some of the ‘models’ being tortured on the site are not there consensually – the hard way. The site is supposed to be the salvation of the big corp, which a lot of reviewers said was ridiculous (and I agree – if Smith Barney were in trouble, they wouldn’t be able to bail themselves out by purchasing Danni’s Hot Box).
Anyhoo … to get relevant to the topic thread … this really ISN’T a hijack … here’s what I wrote:
Nice to know I was right on track!
Didn’t you know you were supposed to learn life lessons through the metaphor of papercrafts? Or something.
The thing about this whole philosophy when applied to businesses is that I don’t WANT to learn any life lessons through the metaphor of papercrafts. I don’t want to learn any life lessons at all. I want to go to work, do my job, not steal too many office supplies, and get my paycheck every other Thursday. I don’t want to share in my co-workers’ lives. I don’t want to become more of a family. I don’t want to learn to trust my co-workers. I don’t want to learn to trust (Og Forbid!) my bosses…the mistrust between labor and management is a fine and upstanding tradition that exists for a reason, and if you try to tell me it’s wrong to feel that way and brainwash me into seeing my supervisor as a father figure, I start to wonder where that’s going to lead down the road a ways. I don’t want to be emotionally invested in my workplace, beyond the bounds of my cubicle, anyway. I’ll emotionally invest in my plants and my magnets. You go emotionally invest in the shareholders.
At my high school, all the 10th graders did this a month or two into the school year. It was actually kinda fun, although I would’ve enjoyed it more if we were just allowed to explore the course ourselves. Still, any “unity” that might’ve develped that day quickly fell apart once we returned to the real world.
Despair.com needs to add this to their line of faux motivational posters. 
About 4 years ago, the company I worked for <cough>dotcom</cough> wasted a whole day with that stupid Fishmarket thing.
A month later, they laid off 40 employees in our office and about 150 company-wide.
Now that’s the way to build morale, you fucking twits. :rolleyes:
In the meeting where they told us “bye”, the regional vice-president had the balls to say, (and I quote, since it’s forever burned into my memory) “It’s days like this that make me really hate my job.” Oh, so sorry for you, shithead. At least you still HAVE one. Fucker.
Geez, Turek! Don’t you know you have to Love What You Do and Choose Your Attitude, and then you, too, may meet a nice fishmonger and fall in love?!
I’ve never done one of these fuckwit sessions. But you can believe that if I ever have to, I’ll first go to my doctor (who’s a very nice and very helpful woman) and get a list of “Mama Tiger is not permitted to participate in this type of activity” excuses that will basically eliminate everything but sitting with my feet up watching the sunset.
I’m also reminded of the associate retreat held a few years ago by a law firm where I was employed at which the managing partner passed out to each associate a sweatshirt with an embroidered pig on it (a play on the firm’s initials) and underneath that a bar code and the letters RPU, for Revenue Producing Unit.
Yeah, that had a team-building effect, all right. He nearly caused the entire group of associates to quit en masse, as a team, of course!
Well, it’s not impossible. For instance, you could find each other by wandering and feeling and stamping. And then invent a rudimentry communication code by “1 tap = a, 2 taps = b” sort of thing, and build up into conveying “23rd of june” etc. And then repeat using a bubble sort algoritm.
But it’s not realistically going to happen because one person not understanding could spoil it. I remember doing something like this where the challenge was to stand in a line facing sideways with each leg tied to a neighbour, and walk forward, but I couldn’t manage to explain the “Look, this pair is 1, that 2, that 1, etc. When I say 1, all ones move forward” concept to anyone but my immediate neighbour.
Also, it’d take forever.
The company I used to work for had one of those stupid-ass retreats last year…and like some of the previous posts it:
- was cumpulsory
- cost the company $20,000
- preceded a giant layoff
Personally, the only thing that made it bearable for me was I decided to spend my time annoying the “facilitators” and fucking with their heads. Every game we played, I made them repeat the rules again, and I found some way to “win” by using their own rules against them.
“So we get a penalty if we have more than one person in the circle? Ok…then let’s put the WHOLE TEAM in the circle at once, stay there, take the SINGLE penalty, and get the task done in 3 seconds” ::blank looks:: ::head scratch::
“Uh…yeah, by the rules you CAN do that” ::insert Keneau Reeves-style whoaaa::
So I say organize your team, dismantle the fucking spider web, and use the bungee cords to hog tie your “facilitator” before locking him/her/it in the trunk of someone’s car. Now THERE’S your damn teamwork!
I had to do this shit once.
My supervisor decided we all needed to do it. Even the graveyard shift. Even the graveyard shift who’d been working the night before the &%#$@ retreat was scheduled.
I was on the graveyard shift at the time, and I suspect I had a much harder time smiling than anyone else. At least it was my day off after the retreat; I don’t know what I would have done if I’d spent eight hours climbing through rope spiderwebs instead of getting a good day’s sleep, and then had to go to work again that night. Others were not so lucky.
I swore that the next time some SOB tried to make me do that crap, I would make a point of stumbling and falling flat on my back, hard… pausing… and then screaming, “I CAN’T FEEL MY LEGS! JESUS! JESUS! JESUS! I’M PARALYZED! OH, JESUS! WHAT THE FUCK HAVE YOU PEOPLE DONE TO ME! JESUS! CALL AN AMBULANCE! CALL MY LAWYER! JESUS! JESUS!”
Wonder what kind of good feelings THAT would produce?
My company made us go sailing for this year’s team-building retreat. Not “sailing” as in a booze cruise on a nice cruise ship, but “sailing” as in sailboat racing in small boats, where you have to burn your hands pulling on the fucking ropes and bruise your ass stumbling around on the hard wooden seats. Everybody hated it until my boss’s boss, who had approved the boondoggle, staggered off of his boat minty green with seasickness. He curled up in a glazed, catatonic fetal position for almost an hour, and then staggered to the edge of the pier and commenced violent projectile vomiting into the harbor.
That made it all worth it. Sometimes, justice is served.