Why not lurk the hood for whores as a team

More exciting than a seminar with awful punch and three-month-since -expired cookies.
If it were me, I'd say, "Screw your plane crash simulator, I'm outta here." And then open the door.

I was working for Bank of America shortly after their merger with Fleet bank a few years ago. They sent everyone in our division to this "team building seminar" for 30 minutes before the seminar, they played this cheesy techno music. All of a sudden the music cuts, and a guy walks up, 3 feet from me and says "I have cancer!" I burst out laughing and was asked to leave.

Our division was shut down 3 months later. These corporate half-wits need to realize, these are a huge waste of time and money.

Frown on your shenanigans

IKillBugs: I was working for Bank of America shortly after their merger with Fleet bank a few years ago. They sent everyone in our division to this "team building seminar" for 30 minutes before the seminar, they played this cheesy techno music. All of a sudden the music cuts, and a guy walks up, 3 feet from me and says "I have cancer!" I burst out laughing and was asked to leave.

Bob. Bob had biatch tits.

Phaid: Bob. Bob had biatch tits.

Funny you posted that, because That's the very reason I started laughing.

Oysterman: Frown on your shenanigans

You beat me to the reference I came in here to make. Oddly, I'm watching the pilot episode right now. It's amazing how far this show has come from being about a group of people stranded on an island after a plane crash.

I think, though, the show proves that this exercise might be a good idea. After some initial fights, everyone has bonded together into a kinda sorta solid group, the ones that haven't died or gone crazy.

Closest I ever came to an actual team-building exercise was one of those insane corporate pep rally things. When I worked at Lexmark, they rented out Rupp Arena in Lexington, KY, and made us all go. They handed out glow sticks and had "motivational aerobics" people dancing to Backstreet Boys (this was in 2000) and other horrible pop music. The best part was the little radio-controlled dirigibles flying around overhead dropping leaflets. Seriously.

I'm not actually sure which was scarier, the fact that management paid for this kind of nonsense, or the fact that the arena was filled with thousands of enthusiastically cheering employees who were genuinely into it.

I had just been hired as an actual employee after being a consultant there for a few years -- the annual pep rally was for employees only, so this was my first one. I was already having serious doubts about staying on, and this experience was what finally prompted me to leave.

The half-day "crash courses" are so popular that BA has taken more than 350 bookings from about:

8,500 oil executives, - Team building? Cartel building more like.
bankers, - Nice, we bail you out and this is how you spend our money.
civil servants - You're an asshole now - and you will still be an asshole when you leave the course.
and staff at the Football Association. - So there's no organisations with whom you are in regular contact that could offer advice on *team* building? Srsly?

Cocktails. That's the only team building thing you need. Take your team out, get them blind drunk. People who hardly know each other will soon be singing Irish folk songs, arguing about which is the best trilogy, causing mischief.

I did a team building exercise once. We'd had lots of new arrivals in a team, and management felt that there was a bit too much grouping of "old" and "new" staff. We did lots of wanky exercises, but ultimately, it was having a few drinks that got people who hardly knew each other talking.

They could have just taken us all out of work for a day's bowling and got us drunk and saved themselves a fortune.

Just to add:-

Once the plane has hit the ground, the "passengers" have to get out as fast as they can through the front and rear exits. By this stage, the employees are so pumped up that on three separate occasions businessmen have shorn through a half-inch steel bolt by hand so as to lift a 45lb overhead escape hatch and climb onto the plane's wing.

Here's the problem: this stuff never works for me. I know the whole thing is artificial, so I can never get enthusiastic about it. I'm in a fake plane - does it matter if I get out a bit later? No, not really. I could sit in there, and soon enough, you'll open it up for me anyway.

Always loathed these things, along with other pseudo-scientific crap that brain-free middle managers dream up. Send me to one of these and you will get a cockpunch in lieu of a letter of resignation.

Team building? Catchy.

If you work for an airline it's just called annual recurrent training.

Plotline on The Office in 3, 2, 1...

I guess there are people out there who actually respond to these "exercises", and they must somehow gravitate toward managerial positions. Otherwise, there wouldn't be an industry catering to these wastes of time and money and productivity.

I'm with farkeruk: pay for an open bar at a local pub, and watch the team build like magic.

edmo: If you work for an airline it's just called annual recurrent training.

And if you're in management at the airline you call selling these exercises "monetizing the bottomline unnegotiables".

heh, from FTFA's comments: "i would have thought bankers have had quite enough practice of escaping from a crash,"

Laura Roberts of London gets one internets.

All I have to say is one thing. When they start to show you shiat like "Who took my cheese?", it is time to get the hell out and find another job.

Wait, they made that idiotic team-building plane crash exercise real?

/Take the beer, it'll last longer than the water.

All I have to say is one thing. When they start to show you shiat like "Who took my cheese?", it is time to get the hell out and find another job.

Amen.


Fark the cheese....leave my coffee and whiskey alone and let me get back to work.

A Banker in the last row keeps yelling
"Is this what you meant by BAILOUT?

I'm not sure what I would enjoy more, watching the nutritional over achievers trying to stand up in under five minutes or, the casualties that I had nothing to do with.

yes, because nothing inspires your people more than knowingly walking into a fabricated situation.

I'd sit in my seat, martini in hand, watching the lemmings kill themselves (and going to the opposite exit... smoke can ruin a perfectly good drink).

I'm all for team spirit, but I'm also for watching the weak be culled from the herd. They usually caused most of the problems in the first place.

/my company hasn't held a "team-building" exercise in over 5 years.
//last time both teams banded together to pummel the leadership who constantly farked them over.
///Good times. Watched the carnage with one of the moderators as we shared a drink (real cutie... sadly she was married)

farkeruk: Cocktails. That's the only team building thing you need. Take your team out, get them blind drunk. People who hardly know each other will soon be singing Irish folk songs, arguing about which is the best trilogy, causing mischief.
Damn right.

Oops, except for that guy that is trying not to fall off the AA wagon. Or the guy who has a religious aversion to drinking. Or the guy with three DUIs and who got told he loses his license and goes to the pokey next time.

...
Glad I don't have any of those in my office!

But plane crash scenario? fark me. That's just ten kinds of wrong. I'm imagining the collection of halfwits I see in the average office, from the massively overweight donut fiend to the arrogant but stupid MBA to the one-guy-that-actually-knows-what-he-is-doing-but-everybody-hates, to the gossip-hound hosebeast.

I've had to take some training related to aircraft crashes, but it was all related to surviving them once you're on the ground. Then again it makes sense cause I fly for work (flight test, none of this wimpy airliner stuff).

Local Area, Non-combat land survival, and water survival FTW. Fun times, and it got me out of the office for 3 days.

My firm has a better solution. We're too busy for such nonsense. They regularly buy us lunch and we have a virtually unlimited expense account when we travel. They don't even care if we eat dinner at the titty bar and get hammered on their dime as long as the work got done on the trip.

Drills like this are good training, at leaqst mostly for flight crews. Let people learn to use the equipment properly and so on.

But any drill has one thing against it. You know you won't actually get killed.

A group from Bank of America was in the crash in the Hudson. No word on how well they're working together these days.