There’s a lady at work, KT who’s in her late 70s and works here because she’s got nothing to do at home. She asked me the other day if I had a camera. I said sure, I’ve got a digital camera.
Wrong answer.
She wants to make a calendar for our boss. She wants each page to have a picture of the people assigned to a particular project, with the project director holding up a map of the state they’re assigned to on what she calls “oaktag”. She says she’s got Kinko’s lined up to print the thing for us. This is going to look so junior high.
So, next Tuesday, I get to go around to each department, tell them to line up and smile, and take their pictures and hope nobody kills me for agreeing to this Mickey Mouse assignment. Most of my department is already considering what lewd and obnoxious messages to put on our “oaktag”. The goth chick is planning on wearing something really tacky. The rest are planning to call in sick that day.
Today, the prez’s secretary sends out a company e-mail. She’s got some Xmas activities lined up for us, including…get this…having a bunch of employees going around SINGING CHRISTMAS CAROLS. Yes, we get the joyous experience of having our coworkers serenade us with Christmas joy. [sub]insert puke smiley here[/sub]
Instead of Noel, it should be HELL NO!
Anybody else having to go through this kind of fresh hell at their office?
We have the “Holiday” luncheon - which is held in a very drafty cattle arena on the state fair grounds. You heard me right. Where the cattle are auctioned.
What strikes me as funny is the food choices… BBQ pork or Turkey. Never any change or options. ever. No I don’t attend.
Let’s see - we’ve got the official tree decorating in the main lobby.
We’ve got a door-decoration contest (We’ve just got cubicles, no doors, so I guess we can’t play.)
We’ve got roaming carolers.
On Monday, we’re all supposed to pose outside our building for a photo that will be shown on the closed-circuit TV (all groups do this in their respective areas.)
We’ve got the opportunity to do a personal greeting that will run on the CC TV.
And, of course, there will be the pot luck lunch which I will ignore as I did the Thanksgiving pot luck.
Once upon a time a long time ago, I enjoyed the holidays. No I just grit my teeth until January.
Incidentally, I work for the Dept of the Navy - your tax dollars at work! Merry Christmas!
Roaming carolers? What kind of talk is this? Who in the world thinks this might be a good idea to implement while people are working??? Good lord a-mighty, if they did that while I was stuck in uberconcentration, I’d be snarling…
I had a manager do something very similar. She had the bright idea of sending her assistant around with a digital camera and a bunch of Santa hats and reindeer antlers taking pictures of all the employees. Her idea was to give everybody a screensaver slideshow CD as a gift, the kind that dissolves from one picture to another.
The problem was this was Christmas two years ago. The World Trade Center attack was still pretty fresh on everybody’s mind, the company’s stock was tanking, we’d just found out our normally generous Christmas bonus was going to be in the form of grocery coupons and, as if that wasn’t bad enough, there had been an accident in a testing bay and a lot of people were working overtime to make deadline. Added to all this is the fact that, frankly, aerospace engineers are typically not a big cuddly bundle of laughs – a characteristic that no quantity of elf hats can improve, nor for the most part do they respond well to having a bubbly, clueless assistant slap a set of reindeer antlers on their heads and proclaim “Aww c’mon. Stop being a 'Mr. Pouty Face!”.
I don’t know who (if anybody) edited it, or if she just turned in the roll of film to whoever made the CD’s, but the result was some of the best unintentional comedy ever produced (if it wasn’t so big I’d post it). Each slide is more grim than the next. The few employees that she actually managed to get smile have dead, cold eyes and she managed to catch me with my eyes half-closed and mouth contorted (I think I was about to sneeze).
And then there was the time that she invited an inner-city youth choir to sing Christmas carols in the lobby – the lobby with the Christmas tree and all the ‘Toys For Tots’ presents – unsupervised…