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

Re: More... (yep, all these are real)

[jducoeur]

The tech support rep who puts the customer on hold, mutters a mantra of foul curses to himself, then comes back again with a perfect phone manner.

Oh, this leads me down *bad* roads. I don't know if even I would dare write the Support Engineer with a bad case of Tourette's, but it's rather tempting.

The Tragedy of the Commons that is the company fridge.

Right! Yes, this definitely needs something. (Man, furnishing the lunchroom is going to be a props challenge.)

And the mass-texting mechanic is intriguing. I hadn't thought about that, but you're right that we are almost at the point of being able to assume that everyone has SMS...

Re: More... (yep, all these are real)

[anu3bis.livejournal.com]

Furnishing the lunch room? Not so hard, really. Get AGMs with kids. We've got wood bananas, tomatoes, eggs, and so on.

To go a little more abstract, brown paper bags with names on them, containing contingency envelopes. Heck, catch me early enough next year and I'll make up sandwiches at the con suite.

On the SMS angle, I'm not sure I've seen much use of tech as a prop in a LARP - makes you wonder what folks could do if they went all-out.

Re: More... (yep, all these are real)

[metageek.livejournal.com]

Depending on the group, you can probably assume it; but you can't necessarily assume that everybody's carriers play nicely together. I'm on AT&T; I've learned that I can't reliably send messages to my father on Verizon. SMS may or may not get through; MMS pictures turn into a message telling him to go to their Web site to see them.

Re: More... (yep, all these are real)

[learnedax.livejournal.com]

On the fridge, I have often found that shared ones get so vile-smelling that it wouldn't be a big leap to make it like the Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul fridge, simply unopened by anyone for months now...

On muting, a recent group of mine was on a conference call where the (religious organization) customer was demanding to know when they could look at the work we'd just started, and one of us, assuming we were on mute, sotto voce remarked "when it's fucking done!".