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

[serakit.livejournal.com]

Well, we fairly often discuss our sex lives at work and have violent ice wars, but I don't exactly work in an office... I also work with a guy who told me about how he was going to shoplift after work.

[hfcougar.livejournal.com]

I recommend checking out something called FISH.

Work made fun gets done! *gag* *stab*stab*stab*

Also, I shit you not, the guy down the hall from me sings everything as if his life were a musical, and has wreaked a horror upon us all known as "Phil Collins Friday". There is a special circle of hell just for him.

[hfcougar.livejournal.com]

Oh, and everyone in my office has this thing for clicking their pens. It's the national pastime of my workplace. Everywhere one goes, clickclickclick click click... The people in our West Coast office HATE us for this and always have to scold someone over the teleconference to cut it the hell out.

[doubleplus.livejournal.com]

Ooooh, boy. I've got a long list from the last days of my company from a few years back. And I had lunch yesterday with a friend who's currently in the midst of an office horror (the works, "not a team player" and everything); I'll have to collect his stories, too.

[cvirtue.livejournal.com]

This could be a minor detail, of the dripping-water-torture type:

For quite a while, I sat in the cube nearest the fax machine and the copier, and would regularly get questions about how to operate them. I did not have a secretarial/administrative job, but for some reason everyone that had troubles with the things asked me for help, interrupting whatever I was working on. The group secretary was only 20 feet away.

[elizabear.livejournal.com]

I had a boss who put air quotes around at least one word in *every* conversation. There was no irony, it was just his habit. He was also awful about zig-zagging on the way to his work goals; every time he heard a bright and shiny idea about working effectively or efficiently, he would call a meeting within hours and make it our new policy.

[jadasc.livejournal.com]

I may have to play in this game, despite having almost no actual office experience. You know, for the challenge of it.

[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.

[liamstliam.livejournal.com]

There needs to be a guy who takes most of the donuts or cookies or whetever else is out.

No, that's not me.

[eudociainboston.livejournal.com]

I worked at an online brokerage firm during the tech bubble blow up and we had a client who lost MILLIONS doing stupid shit like buying stuff on margin(against his broker's advice). The receptionist was on vacation and all non brokers were taking a turn on phones so this guy kept calling saying he was going to come over and kill the big boss- who sat 20 feet from me- but not hurt me because he liked me because I was always able to fix problems with his trading software (uh, yeah, when the bullets start flying like he was going to pay attention to where they were going). The police got involved and the boss paid to have a plainclothed armed guard sit in the reception area all day. Yup, we felt secure (hah). The police caught ex-millionare guy before he made it to the front door of the building carrying a rather large, heavy duffle bag...

Same industry- different firm. We were all called into the conference room to celebrate the release of some new software. There was music, cake, champaigne... and a stripper jumping out of the cake who then gave lap dances for the rest of the party. All paid for by the CEO. The two other women who worked for the firm and I started updating our resumes and left within a month.

At another IT job I walked in on two project managers and a depatment head snorting cocaine in a conference room. They didn't see me and I shut the door fast. The deadline was breathing down our neck but I thought coke was an extreme way to deal with it. Looking back, their drug use explained a LOT about their management styles.

Is that enough? Because I have more.

[jducoeur]

Heh. The sex talk and the shoplifting angle both have definite promise (and I'll chew on the ice wars) -- thanks!

[jducoeur]

... wow, that may be weirder than anything I could come up with on my own.

As for FISH -- hadn't heard of it, but it suggests a bunch of delicious plot options. Thanks!

[jducoeur]

Hah! This demands an OCD character, to turn into open warfare...

[jducoeur]

Heh. Given that the copier is *clearly* significant to this game, I may have to work this one in. Thanks!

[jducoeur]

Hah! Oh, that's great -- positively Dilbert-esque. I may have to write a character around this guy: he's just perfect for this game. Thanks!

[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!

[jducoeur]

Yes, you're right -- there definitely does need to be. (Donuts. Need a meeting with donuts.) Thanks!

[dryfoo.livejournal.com]

Here's an idea: your game's lore-master character (or npc) -- the guy who actually knows where the forms are kept and the bodies are buried? He's disguised as a "Wally" -- a guy whose only apparent office activities are morning coffee break and extensive non-business-related copying and printing. Other than that, he resides, oracle-like, in a men's room stall, doing crossword puzzles and dispensing wisdom to any who can figure out that he's the guy to ask.

[jducoeur]

Wow. Those are not just interesting, they're very well-suited to LARP -- I might well use all three of them. Thanks!

(And feel free to keep unloading if you're so motivated: at this point, I'm collecting any and all ideas. Once those start running down, I'll begin to mix down the game and see what comes out of it. Don't feel pressed -- this is a *great* collection -- but I'd be entirely happy to get more...)

[jducoeur]

This actually synergizes rather well with a suggestion msmemory made last night. Might well do that -- thanks!

[fenicedautun.livejournal.com]

This isn't a horror story per se, but this is what my job really was like (before laid off) and may work well for getting a character inserted into a LARP. I worked for a department based in Charlotte, on a national project, with nobody in the office building I was in working with me. Many of them encountered me on projects (I knew people, and they knew who I was and what I did), but my work was completely separate. And my boss would generally miss our meetings where she'd tell me what was going on, and then call randomly later. (I actually wondered whether she'd call me to lay me off, or whether I'd first know when I couldn't log in.)

And my first job after college, the office manager would hire her family to be admins, controlled the petty cash box, and was always out sick. And the office handyman was mentally disabled (really, he was what would have been called slow 50 years ago), and he had so much trouble understanding which sodas people wanted him to order for the Coke machine. (I think really I'm just giving you good ideas for NPCs who can turn up to make things happen.)

[mermaidlady]

I worked with someone who constantly jingled the change in his pocket.

[dryfoo.livejournal.com]

Little touches here and there, like a red Swingline stapler, would undoubtedly be greeted with recognition and laughs.

[siderea]

So there was the temp job I had where it turned out the drepartmental pres, vp, and their pet secretary (the one they were being forced to discharge for gross dereliction endangering others lives) all belonged to the same cult. And I do mean cult -- this was at a university that had banned that same religious org from recruiting on campus because of their, uh, techniques.

My handful

[metageek.livejournal.com]

The chief engineer who started dating the secretary. Followed by the CEO who started sleeping with her.

The Wally who could never understand why he needed to shut down his Unix machine (instead of just flipping the switch), or why his files kept getting corrupted. Oh, or why he got fired when he spent an hour and a half snoring at his desk.

The development manager for Netscape who, on his way to a meeting to license important strategic technology, wound up chatting about it for hours on the plane with someone who turned out to work for Microsoft.

The VP who told the press about a $50M contract that the company was sure to win...two weeks before the decision was made. The customer was not pleased. The company did not get the contract.

The "how we did it at my last job" guy.

The people who spend vast chunks of time on their fantasy football leagues. (To quote Dave Barry: "This is crazy, right? If these people said they were managing herds of pretend caribou, the authorities would be squirting lithium down their throats with turkey basters.")

The marketing VP who spent $100,000 on advice on how to rename the company, came up with a really stupid name, and didn't let the fact that the name was already taken slow her down. (The other company was in a different industry, but stupidname.com was taken, so she registered stupidnameinc.com...and was surprised when customers sending email kept forgetting the "inc".)