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.

Re: Reorgs

[jducoeur]

Oh, that's a nice one! I was already thinking about organization-chart confusion, and this is a good twist on that idea.

(In 2.5 years at Netscape, I went through 10 reorgs.)

I will say that this thread is doing nothing to change my preference for small companies. (Which, admittedly, have their own problems, but at least I have a little more influence.)