Seeking office horror stories

[jducoeur]

I seem to have accidentally wound up with the high concept for my game for Intercon next year. (As so often, it's all Christian's fault: he is always a font of game ideas.)

To that end, I am looking for any and all ideas for Drip -- the water-cooler horror game. It's going to be a vicious satire of All Things Office. The ideas are already flowing pretty quickly, but I welcome more: if you have character ideas, situations or just war stories about Office Life, send them along and I might work them in. Feel free to brainstorm wildly: weird and unlikely isn't necessarily a bar here. (Those who remember Panel will know how willing I am to get downright strange in my scenarios.)

(No, tpau, I'm not bidding it yet. Among other things, I haven't figured out the game's scope yet. It might be a one-hour 10-person Z game, a two-hour 20-person Sunday-or-Friday game, or a full four-hour 25-to-30-person slot. Once I understand how big the game is, I can think about bidding it...)

Comments

Reorgs

[metageek.livejournal.com]

There should be frequent reorgs, and not all of them should be communicated to everybody. This actually happened to me at Netscape: my group got moved to a different department, and nobody told me until the admin of my old department came by with my mail and told me I should be using the mailstop for my new department. (In 2.5 years at Netscape, I went through 10 reorgs.)

To crank it up a notch, you could have people getting silently reorged into new responsibilities, and then they get in trouble for still doing their old jobs.

[cvirtue.livejournal.com]

The people who are married to each other, have different surnames, that (almost) nobody knows are married.

The person with significant verbal claims of $CONDITION who does not exhibit any obvious symptoms.

[learnedax.livejournal.com]

Things I haven't seen mentioned elsewhere. All are from places I've worked; some may be from places we've both worked; some of them might have been me.

- The guy who wore headphones all the time, bounced around, sand aloud with his music, and played occasional air guitar.

- The guy who was constantly drumming on every surface nearby, in his cube, at meetings, etc.

- The girl who always ended your sentences for you, sometimes muttered under her breath.

- The VP who kept trying to nudge the company in the direction of the porn industry.

- The CEO who openly discussed his, probably ceased, meth habit, and gave people tips on passing drug tests.

- The new-employee hazing which included getting up in front of everyone and telling an embarassing funny anecdote about yourself. (I actually skipped out on that one completely.)

- The employees who ordered a monogrammed wooden combination bottle opener and dildo shipped to the VP at the office.

- The employee who emailed the whole company at 3am apologizing for his poor understanding of appropriate office behavior. And who later on wandered around with a guitar serenading management. And who was a week or so late coming back to work because he didn't have enough money to fly back from Spain.

- The CEO who was pre-op transgendered and presented professionally as female - except when government customers were visiting, when he expected everyone to know that he was presenting male.

The Dilbert Principle

[metageek.livejournal.com]

I just started rereading The Dilbert Principle, and realized you should be mining it; it's got stories even stranger (or at least more detailed) than ordinary Dilbert.

[cvirtue.livejournal.com]

Another one from real life of a relative:

Company revenue is falling. People are taking pay cuts. In order to get things done (allegedly,) the salespeople are taken off of making sales and put to work doing administrative tasks on old business, thus, no new revenue will be coming in.

Are you still looking for office horror stories?

[cvirtue.livejournal.com]

Here's one I heard today:

Small sales office CEO: You were $30 over your plan allowance for last month on the company cell phone. Could you keep an eye on your usage to be more efficient?

Employee: Sure, no problem. Could you give me the description of what our plan covers so that I'll know what the parameters are?

CEO: We don't have that information.

[jducoeur]

Note to self: see this one from Jane...