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

[aishabintjamil.livejournal.com]

* I work for an environmental consulting firm. We moved the office last fall. In the course of packing our chemist discovered a box of soil samples from Fort Devens (potentially containing pesticides and maybe some PCBs, depending on exactly where they were from, in her office under some boxes of papers. They were all in sealed jars, and being from 2006, anything they might have leaked into the air was long gone, but it did result in her getting a lot of crap from the rest of us about why she had them. (We don't do any in-house analysis, so there was absolutely no good reason to bring samples back to the office. They go straight to the subcontracted lab, and from there to the labs disposal facilities). This was preceded by a week or so by our safety officer sending around a notice about proper disposal of any chemical containing items (mostly thinking of things like field test kits).

* our IT person came in a couple of months ago proudly announcing that he'd just bought the same model of semi-automatic gun as they used on the A-Team over the weekend. (The office is in NH).

* one of our senior managers has a cell phone with a ring-tone made by recording a particularly resonant cow mooing. Before that he had a small, pathetic kitten. It provides entertainment when he forgets to turn it off during large meetings.

* not really office exactly, but we're an EPA contractor, and sent people down to assist with the Hurricane Katrina response. One morning the daily safety briefing included the following caution: "If you must pick up hookers after your shift, please remove your EPA COntractor shirt first. Also, please refrain from doing it in the lobby of the hotel we're putting you up in."

Many years ago when I was at MIT Lincoln Labs one of the resident PhDs came over one Monday morning to tell me that the terminal on the Symbolics computer had been emitting smoke on Saturday, and now it wasn't working. I asked him if he'd unplugged it, and reported it to security. No, of course he hadn't. He just went home. Leaving behind him a piece of electronics that might have been ready to start a fire.

[jducoeur]

Oh, those are delicious. I may have to circulate the hooker memo in-game, just for sheer giggles. (It interacts interestingly with the stripper story, down-thread.) Thanks!

[cvirtue.livejournal.com]

Office Xmas gift exchange: One fellow brought a book "Guide to whorehouses in Mexico."

[jducoeur]

... oh, this is a dangerous idea. I could have the Mandatory Fun be a gift swap. That could be *horrifying*...