Reading Joolz' recent posts reminds me why I'm not working with Mike. Mike works at a very large internet apparel company whose name rhymes with Zappo's, and they work very hard to make you feel like part of a big, utopian corporate family.
I hate family. I don't talk to my family, I am horribly confused about what to do around my wife's family, and if the place where I work doesn't want me to go bugnuts at the very mention of me being a part of theirs then I'd better be working for the fucking mafia. The way I see it, all the time companies spend coming up with little get-togethers and team builders to bring people closer together can be used for something much more important- supporting my raging drug habit so I have something to be grateful for.
Where did team-building exercises come from? Well, let's say you work at the most obvious sort of establishment you can possibly work at here in Las Vegas (not the fucking brothels, losers). Let me tell you, working at a corporate casino is the epitome of living your life in total fear. You are reminded how little you mean to the company every day. They have reduced the concept of a pay raise to that of a beautiful insult; they will literally tell you the average pay raise percentage per year and give you less out of spite. The reason they do this is because the corporate casinos could care less how much you bust your ass for them; they care about something called seniority, which is business-ese for "rewarding the people who don't work enough to hate their jobs after ten years".
One day long ago, during the Golden Age of Corporate Fear, your best option was to work for a huge corporation, because people needed benefits to survive. At some point, a company tried a team building exercise which nobody liked, then asked each employee to say how much they gained. Each employee, afraid of losing their lifelines, painted the whole process with glowing praise, and this result was written down as Law in the annals of business history.
Let me tell you something. After three years of being told how expendable I was as a person, I quit my job on the spot and got a job at a small company with zero benefits and paychecks which sometimes disappeared when the business was going through rough patches. I was paid more than I'd ever made previously in my life just because I knew Perl. I never met more than four people who worked outside of the programming department and company rules were that non-programmers had to treat us like gods among men and harbingers of ill fate. I'm sure it sucked for everybody else, but when you're literally being paid to go across the street to the bar and get smashed for six hours straight before coming back and cranking out an application (projected time was always about twenty times how long it took to actually write it), you cease caring about other people. You cease even acknowledging other people have names. And if someone has the audacity to address you by name when they are far beneath your station, you start to do some pretty crazy things. Like inventing team-building exercises to punish them.
