Tuesday, August 24, 2010

Morning Mayhem of the Corporate World

I'm doing something I never do, because I think it's dumb.  I never bitch about my job on a blog, ever.  You write it on the internet, and it will come back to you.  It doesn't matter if you publish your blog with your full name or a super-cool-pseudo alias like mine (hah!), it will return.  However, I'm past the point of caring and if I got fired tomorrow it would be a relief - this stuff needs to be shared with unknowing public.


Every morning at work we have a huddle.  This huddle is at a precise time every day.  Not a normal meeting time like 8:30, 9:45, 9:15 etc... but an odd number.  Every day, just to be cool and "alternative" (this place where I am oh-so-hoping to get out of is just so alternative) we have this huddle at 9:17am. 

On my first day, I figured "huddle" was just a colloquial term for company briefing, and that made sense to me.  Little did I know that at 9:16 someone would run through the office yelling "LET'S HUDDLE!" and music would start playing.  This wasn't as bad as what followed next - the group clap.  Readers, every day at 10:13am I have to clap in unison with my entire office... to music. 

Let it be said for the record that I am not "a clapper", so this is somewhat difficult to do every morning before I'm really awake.

What follows after the music stops is first the sharing of good news.  Employees may raise their hand to share good news which ranges from "Sales were great yesterday" to "My mom made me cookies this weekend and it was awesome."  After each good news, the huddle leader will determine how many claps the good news deserved.  From what I can tell, below is a range of clapping awesomeness.


After the sharing of good news, then we move onto the themes of the day.  I won't go into specific details about these themes, but each day deals with a different department of the company and there is cheesy alliteration involved. 

Following the daily themes, we have critical issues - where employees share any problems they have with the company or work place.  Only brave souls go here, and frankly I would need something along the lines of a dissertation compared to a 30 second shout out even if I wanted to fry my ass publicly in front of the CEO.

The finale of this morning event is where we "bring it in", and by we I mean an employee who's one of the tallest/biggest men I ever seen.  NFL linebackers would be jealous.  My first day, I got stepped on by this man who stampeded his way to the center of the huddle to "bring it in".  Now, as soon as I hear the word we're going to 'bring it in for' of the day (usually something inspiring like energy, momentum, or "rocketship") I jump out to the side of the group so my flip flop feet don't get stomped on.  Once "it's in" there's lots of intense group clapping until we repeat the word of the day.

Pray for me.

Here's hoping tomorrow is a rocketship kind of day.

1 comment:

  1. I'm not sure if this is closer to scene in Office Space, or Group Hate in 1984. Totally awesome. You should keep working there because you just can't make crap like that up. That's largely why I keep my job.

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