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

[eclecticmagpie.livejournal.com]

Salesman who keeps selling the product to people who have computers it won't work on.

Engineer who insists on an elaborate, tremendously lengthy, test of his circuit board, then complains about how long it takes to execute, and compares it to another programmer's quick test software -- which skips the test in question because it took so long to execute.

Manager who explains that one shouldn't waste time looking for the bug in hardware, because it's KNOWN to be a software problem -- turned out it was a stack overflow, in the hardware, and took an extra 6 months to find because of his "help".

The Data General "Eagle" syndrome -- after the Eagle was developed (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Soul_of_a_New_Machine), DG decided that they should, as a general policy, bring in college new-hires and stick them in the middle of failing projects with no management support -- after all, it worked once.

Manager who asks an underling to call and run a meeting, then sabotages the meeting. My favorite from this was "Don't you DARE think that you understand my agenda!"

IT director who, when necessary to reboot the server during office hours, gets on the intercom and announces "This is your Captain speaking. The Computer is going DOWN in five minutes. Repeat, The Computer is Going Down." (his caps!)

[metageek.livejournal.com]

Ooh, intercoms. One company I worked at had that (a broadcast function on the phones, actually), and it was terrible. I wound up having to borrow the manual for the phone system and configure my phone to ignore broadcasts.

[jducoeur]

Lots of good ideas, especially the manager sabotaging the underling's meeting. (Which is very in the spirit of the game.) Thanks!