Team Building

A few weeks back I had my work's team building day. I know that these days are supposed to encourage a good working rapport and be all teamy and jolly, but they invariably leave you feeling degraded and a bit depressed about your life
The sort of activities that you do on team building days would probably be quite fun, if you were doing them with actual friends and not having to do them to prove you can actually converse with another human being without imploding. And yes, implode rather than explode. Exploding would be far too extrovert for a sociopath.

 This team building day in particular was especially arduous. Coinciding with an intense PMT week, the last thing I wanted to do was laser quest and ice skate (fortunately it wasn't laser quest on ice skates).
Laser quest wasn't actually too bad, and was made more amusing by the illiterate attendant. I'm not sure how you achieve such a disregard for the natural order of vowels and consonants, but the attendant was certainly dedicated to this end.

So, we trundled into the gaming area (which would not have looked out of place on the set of Red Dwarf), with our unpronounceable names and spent a merry few minutes shooting the crap out of each other. The novelty soon wore off when I realised that I could just stay hidden in a corner and shoot the occasional passing colleague, and in the meantime just dream about chocolate.

By the time we reached the ice rink I had descended into a morose state with a touch of murderous intent. The prospect of being handed a set of shoes with razor sharp blades on the bottom was actually quite appealing. I did, however, sit this one out as I have a fear of ice-skating since I once slipped on ice and my knee went out to the side in an impressive, and bio-mechanically wrong, 90o angle. It was not comfortable.

From a business point of view, I think team building days are actually quite successful - you scurry back to your desk and work your productive little heart out to discourage managers from sending you on further team building days. You send unnecessary emails, make pointless calls to members of your team in an effort to prove that you are indeed a team player, and in no way require the perceived benefits of further team building events.

******Apologies for the long delay between posts. Due to being away and a family crisis, blogging took a back-burner******