Are We Having Fun Yet?
LABASH, MATT
Are We Having Fun Yet? The infantilization of corporate America By Matt Labash Wilmington, Del. If you're a loyal employee like me, you occasionally check your company's Vision Statement to make...
...A Microsoft survey of 38,000 people worldwide found that workers, by their own admission, only average three productive days per week...
...But if you thought the fun stopped there, you're sadly mistaken...
...I tell her I just don't see it, though I would pay to watch her bolster Fred Barnes's morale with finger puppets...
...Even before they started the company, Jayla and her partner Nick Gianoulis, whose title is Godfather of Fun, had a reputation among their circle of friends as being fun people...
...Like a diseased appendix bursting and spreading infectious bacteria throughout the abdomen, fun is insinuating itself everywhere, into even the un-hippest workplaces...
...Last month, I went to see them in action...
...The afternoon heat is sweltering, and by the end of the playfair, HBCS's CFO is in a magnanimous mood, and lets everybody go home, though it's only 3 p.m...
...For my money however, if I was the kind of employer who was funhibited enough to have to hire a pro, I'd go with the Fun Department of Wilmington, Delaware, which endeavors to bring "recess to work...
...As I contacted them for input to this story, their pain was evident...
...A considerable corpus of literature on their discipline is amassing...
...Using examples culled from real companies in real office parks throughout America, the authors suggest using fun as "an organizational strategy—a strategic weapon to achieve extraordinary results" by training your people to learn the "fun-damentals" so as "to create fun-atics" (most funsul-tants appear to be paid by the pun...
...But if you had to distill what they do in one word, "fun" would be your best bet...
...And in there...
...If I got hit," he says, "I know people would be out there cheering...
...I've got seven people that have to process 1.7 million claims a year...
...In the interest of not appearing to be a killjoy, I should disclose that I am adamantly pro fun-at-work, if by "fun at work" you mean "sending tasteless emails to friends," "stockpiling office supplies," and "leaving early...
...Services include everything from quick toy drops ("fun on the run") to staging Solid Gold danceoffs, paper airplane contests, silly-string wars, human roulette, and a couple dozen other funtivities...
...There's no lessons in this...
...Everybody was groaning big-time on that one...
...Out here, he's relaxed, he's in shorts, he's eating Italian ice...
...One of the most popular funtivities involves a manager's face-off, where the bosses must grab a partner, and toss water-balloons back and forth to each other, wearing pirate patches on one eye to distort depth perception...
...It got cancelled because of a firm re-org, not because it was ludicrous...
...As you learn in Classics 101, the ancient Greek word for work was ponos derived from the same root as the Latin poena, meaning "sorrow...
...They enjoy having fun...
...A good funsultant, however, doesn't bill fun at the office as a cessation of work, but rather, casts the two as halves of a whole, what Leslie Yerkes, author of Fun Works: Creating Places Where People Love To Work, calls a "Fun/Work Fusion...
...For all employer nods to serving as cruise directors on the Funship Lollipop, a Conference Board survey reports that fewer than half of all Americans are satisfied with their jobs, down from 60 percent 20 years ago...
...at work...
...I've done jet-pilots, geo-caching, a lot of "war-gaming," all in the name of team-building...
...Forget industriousness, talent, and know-how—the wellspring of employees' satisfaction, creativity, and prosperity is fun...
...I'm a prick," he says without pause...
...My office, for instance, would be a very tough sell...
...Also, the Inc...
...Our job is to eliminate the fun-killers...
...A placid scene of rowers sculling on a glassy lake as their coxswain shouts instructions is disrupted by the caption: "Get to Work—You aren't being paid to believe in the power of your dreams...
...I'm given a T-shirt—a medium instead of large, since the large is "boxy"—and I'm wearing it as I write...
...But that wouldn't be true...
...I'll let him have the floor...
...The best that can possibly be said about your output is that you've invented a bunch of new words that make your profession just esoteric enough that the lay person (the guy in the machine shop) will pay an extra quarter of a cent on every pack of Doublemint gum to 'double his pleasure and double his fun.'" Don had some momentum, and I wanted to hear more...
...Dave and Mark also run their own successful mascot company—they are trainers and headhunters for furry creatures who perform at major and minor league baseball games...
...You're not making anything...
...I hope there will be management parables...
...No touching...
...She looks like a Marketing Maven too...
...They get it," says Dave...
...Maybe there are only 2 billion real jobs and all the rest of us are being relegated to bullshit jobs, like fun coaches and creative directors...
...Can you imagine standing up in front of 70 directors playing f—ing bongo drums...
...Maybe you assumed the fun stopped when the tech bubble burst...
...The Office is a sitcom, but it could easily be a reality show...
...How necessary or advisable is it for employers to facilitate fun, and how fun could the fun possibly be that they are facilitating...
...As we watch a "Pass the Treasure Key" exercise, in which teams have to wrap yarn around their body parts, then string a key on it, passing the key all the way down the line in the fastest time, I ask Mark what the point of this is, expecting some sort of management parable...
...For fun, she often goes to Target to look at their innovative packaging...
...They have "fun for fun's sake—while reducing tension, bolstering creativity, and building relationships...
...If you're in marketing, what do you actually do...
...As for the funsultants themselves, they're truly living the American dream...
...A Salary.com/America Online survey found the average worker admitting to squandering 2.09 hours of each 8-hour workday, excluding lunch and breaks, and other estimates have put the number as high as 40 percent of each day...
...Professional consultant-basher Martin Kihn, who is himself a consultant, and who wrote House of Lies: How Management Consultants Steal Your Watch and Then Tell You the Time, writes of everything from flag consultants to compost consultants to Satanic consultants who don't actually worship Lucifer (consultants tend not to believe in anything...
...Still, there was a refreshing lack of management parables, and the Funsters, purists to the last, really did seem to want to bring the fun for fun's sake...
...We can [bring the fun] for you too...
...Since there's no beach or ocean nearby, however, funtivities will commence under the theme "Playfair Under the Sea...
...Not only does Ron understand the "intrinsic power of combining EXCELLENCE with humor," he's even set up a "humor injections" blog, giving cyberslackers a way to have good, clean, nonsarcastic fun...
...There are "play stations" all over the grounds: an oversized inflated basketball hoop, a ring-toss pit, a Yahtzee game with giant fuzzy dice, a "Deep Sea Fishing" station, which consists of two baby pools with children's fishing poles to fish out magnetic rubber duckies that can be redeemed for trinkets like finger puppets and wind-up toys...
...Coercive joviality,' as you put it, would have gotten your ass kicked in the machine shop, or at the very least it would have been seen as deviant...
...But having to make a chemical company seem interesting to outsiders—she wonders if "that wasn't the beginning of thinking about how you make work fun...
...So everybody has to keep their heads down, and keep going...
...Pass the 'shine, Buford...
...Raymond Entertainment Group shares office space with the Fun Department, and the Fun Department has its own mascot, a "purple party dude" named Reggie...
...Duty called: "I have an all-day meeting on metrics...
...If you're a loyal employee like me, you occasionally check your company's Vision Statement to make sure all the 7"s in "empowerment" have been crossed, and the I's in "mission" have been dotted...
...It was a good party (though "a little beer wouldn't hurt nobody," one Sprite-sipping woman told me), but not that good...
...They proudly show off the place...
...No slaves to fashion here at The Weekly Standard, where the clocks stopped around 1957, our office is mercifully free of such managerial fads...
...I catch him cheating by flipping up his eye patch, and zero in on him afterwards to blackmail some truth out of him...
...You have to break up the monotony somewhat," he says...
...Most head straight for the buffet line to feast on clams that are bound in mini-fishing nets, which seem to be secured with Gordian knots...
...She didn't, she says, "though I thought nylon was pretty spiffy, and no woman would argue with lycra...
...I met one of their four principal partners for dinner— Jayla Boire...
...The truth is, if they are done well they are a lot of fun, despite the pessimism that invariably precedes them...
...Call it a management parable, if you will: If you treat people like they're six years old, eventually they'll start responding in kind...
...But Jayla makes clear that the partners don't wish to have the mascot company used as a "brand identifier," even though Dave "knows fun from the inside out...
...I've had a few that have made me want to buy a VW bus and [hit the road...
...It's not about playing by the rules...
...Mankind has pretty much looked for loopholes ever since...
...Early the next morning, the Funsters are giddy with anticipation in preparation for a gig: getting loose, doing dance moves, engaging in lots of verbal towel-snapping...
...I ask her if she had a burning desire to further the cause of polyurethane...
...Since we all forget to play as adults, as funsultants repeatedly tell us, they seem intent on speaking to us as though we're children...
...He's my college buddy Don McKinney, a creative director/advertising hotshot responsible for campaigns like Nissan's "Shift...
...But after he incorrectly guesses "up," when the Funsters call "down," he is eliminated...
...Yet as soon as a job turns into an actual job (something my dad would actually call work), we start looking around for the next prettiest girl at the dance...
...While most business books, according to Kihn, are written on about a 7th-grade level (there are exceptions like Who Moved My Cheese...
...They don't have a trade association yet, and they go by all sorts of different names, usually with "fun" as a prefix (funsultants, funcilitators, etc...
...Wilmington is a company town for DuPont, the world's second largest chemical company ("Uncle Dupey," as she calls it), and Jayla worked for them too...
...I use the word "literature" loosely, to mean a series of often ungrammatical double-spaced sentences put on paper, slapped between festively colored covers, and sold to mouth-readers with too much discretionary income...
...If you thought there were only 301 Ways to Have Fun at Work, as suggested by the smash book that's been translated into 10 languages, then you're shortchanging yourself, because technically, there are 602 ways, according to the follow-up, 301 More Ways to Have Fun at Work...
...I think this day is actually critical...
...They "create consistent, quick, at-work experiences that motivate and invigorate the work environment...
...Is that the work ethic that made America great...
...We think carefully about what body parts are involved...
...The culminating funtivity is a cash grab on a Twisterlike mat between two people, in which they stuff as much money into their various pockets, shirtfronts, and orifices as humanly possible...
...Says one VP of human resources: "We try...
...Helping the Fun Department deliver all this levity are the Funsters, on-call hourly-wagers, mostly college students who are fit and vital and look like Abercrombie models, and who wear zany tie-dyed shock-yellow-and-orange T-shirts with "Team Fun" inscribed on the back...
...It happened at 12:05 p.m., and we talked to Matt and Jayla about it and they were okay with it...
...Basically, we sent out a list of compliance-related questions at the beginning of the week, and anyone who scored a certain amount or higher got to play in the Compliance Jeopardy game...
...Probably not...
...Once a freelance journalist whose favorite story ever was one she wrote on a local coffee shop named Brew Ha Ha, she had a host of marketing jobs before hanging out a shingle with her other straight-marketing company, The Right Idea...
...After all the paradigm-shifting and diversity-training and outsourcing and TQM'ing and synergizing and empowering and value-adding and globalizing and downsizing and full-frontal lobotomizing, maybe finger puppets are just the logical terminus...
...Astra-Zeneca, it turns out, has a culture of fun, which makes the Fun Department's job easier...
...Whatever...
...He is wearing a referee's shirt, though he says, "I'm the referee just like in wrestling—the one who didn't see anything...
...Ahhhh, the boyish hijinks of it all...
...She's dealt with Doubting Thomases before...
...We said we can play heads or hips...
...They reluctantly okayed Balloon Choo Choo, a race where people press balloons between their bodies, then chug away, moving as a team without dropping any...
...An inveterate griller, Nick, who was a district manager in the electrical wholesaling business, was a member of the Circuit Club, which planned fun activities in their workplace...
...It's about putting clown shoes on the ground...
...They think it's much more important to have "fun for fun's sake...
...But a subhead on the signage reveals that they are merely "World Leaders in Thermal Analysis and Rheolog...
...There are all sorts of relay games, like the aforementioned racy Balloon Choo Choo...
...She thinks that's when the fun started...
...But planning all that internal fun can be a real time goblin if you actually want to, well, work...
...Say the balloon drops and somebody bumps into each other from behind...
...Aristotle regarded work as a wasteful impediment to pursuing virtue...
...His employees don't think he's the least bit funny, yet the Dunder Mifflin office is a stage, and Michael is its headliner...
...The Fun Department is a full-service fun-shop...
...There were Daily Doubles...
...It's about them having fun...
...As Lord of the Deal Mark Doughty explains, "I work very hard not to have a real job...
...When one Funster asks a large black woman how the food is, she says, "I'll let you know if I can ever get to it...
...So who's to say the funsultants are worse than anything else that's happened to the American corporate drone over the decades...
...But the Fun Department has come to do the company's second annual "playfair...
...Under the guise of fun, the employees will be subjected to Sumo-wrestling contests and walking over a bed of hot coals to determine who will replace Michael...
...Fun isn't just about theory in books...
...I ask...
...From 1978-1993, he served as the Philadelphia Phillies mascot, the furry green bullhorn-beaked Phillie Phanatic...
...It's the New Core Value...
...Their books are thick with instances of how successful businessmen keep things loosey-goosey at work...
...We test every game...
...Winners went into the training room, and played Compliance Jeopardy just like the real game show...
...Writes Moore: There's gold in institutionally mandated humor...
...It looks like a hard, monotonous job...
...He dresses like a "backwoods, country nerd in red suspenders and polyester pants" and promises your employees some "high-octane country sunshine" with his "wacky inventions and crazy stories about kinfolk and farm animals...
...Or of mental illness," I helpfully add...
...But] we're completely irreverent respectfully, within the constraints of all the HR rules, because there are HR rules...
...But I'm told snug'n'sexy=fun...
...They ended up joining forces with two other partners, Dave Raymond, the Emperor of Fun and Games, and Mark Doughty, Lord of the Deal, who would expertly translate fun theory into fun-filled games...
...Here's an abbreviated list of the jollity that will ensue at your place of business if you follow their advice: "joy lists," koosh balls, office-chair relay races, marshmallow fights, funny caption contests, job interviews conducted in Groucho glasses or pajamas, wacky Olympics, memos by Frisbee, voicemails in cartoon-character voices, rap songs to convey what's learned at leadership institutes, "break-athons," bunny teeth, and asking job prospects to bring show and tell items such as "a stuffed Tigger doll symbolizing the interviewee's energetic and upbeat attitude" or perhaps a "neon-pink mask and snorkel worn to demonstrate a sense of humor, self-deprecating nature, and sense of adventure...
...of the Deal" Doughty potty humor=fun...
...for Teens that are written on a 5th-grade level), the funsultant literature regresses all the way back to primary school...
...We had a client who was a little challenged by the political incorrectness," he explains...
...In Mike Veeck's Fun Is Good, the cofounder of Hooters Restaurants reveals, "I don't know if we could've survived without humor," whereas to the untrained eye it looked like Buffalo Chicken Strips served with large sides of waitress's breasts were the secret to his success...
...Inside are wan touches to cheer up the place: a glittery star hanging from the corkboard ceiling above the head of a top performer's cubicle here, a beach ball or a fish mobile there...
...I wouldn't call them sexy—HR wouldn't approve—but they're fun to look at...
...There's not a lot of time for fun and games in his world...
...I would be willing to bet that, compared with the last generation, an overwhelming number of us would be considered support staff in a war...
...He said], we don't want our employees to put their hands on their tails, even if it's their own tails...
...They are smart, competent, creative people with highly refined senses of humor—fully formed adults...
...Or at least you hoped it did...
...Everybody's excited...
...There is a remedy for cynicism like Moore's: Hire a funsultant...
...My non-journalism friends aren't quite as fortunate...
...The genius of the NBC television show The Office (and the original BBC show from which it derived) is that boss Michael Scott, manager of a failing paper-distribution branch in Scranton, goes well beyond the Dilbertesque stereotype of the dictator cracking the whip over his cubicle monkeys...
...As Alan Briskin, author of The Stirring of the Soul in the Workplace, writes: "Sarcasm is one-sided fun...
...It is limited and non-universal...
...Answers had to be in the form of questions...
...As the funtivities kick off, the Funsters form a dancing gauntlet around the back door, wearing swim caps and snorkels and other water-related funnery...
...He has a helium tank on his desk, and is blowing up balloons that he then twists into hat shapes for coworkers...
...There's a new core value on the loose, and it goes by the name of "Fun...
...Except then he announces, to the displeasure of everyone but his suck-up henchman Dwight Schrute (whose most pressing concern is whether he's "assistant regional manager" or "assistant to the regional manager"), that "Today, we are not just spending a day at the beach...
...We're actually planning a group event that will involve 'conference bikes.' It's a rickshaw-related transportation option focused on tourists...
...Charles, Illinois...
...I stand next to Mark Doughty, Lord of the Deal, watching the spectacle...
...They have business cards featuring "Sparky," a smiling blue-faced logo with crazy, spinning goggle-eyes...
...Jayla says that they might be signing up American Standard, the toilet manufacturer, with whom they have a meeting on September 11 (tragic anniversaries=not fun...
...One pal, who works for a large financial concern, tells me darkly, "My role here is largely 'gleetivities' oriented...
...People laughed, people lined the dance floor during the Booty Call, people cleared out of the parking lot before the boss could finish his announcement...
...He had to go...
...HR!'" The zaniness works, says Jayla, because "We're not their bosses...
...Well, he says, during National Healthcare Compliance Week, "We did Compliance Jeopardy...
...Dwight, pumping his fist as everyone else groans, says, "I knew it wasn't just a trip to the beach...
...They understand...
...The demons that gnaw achingly painful holes in his or her intestines are forgotten long enough to finalize that sales report...
...I ask him how he feels about companies formalizing fun...
...So it stands to reason that with the new core value of fun on the ascent, there would be fun consultants...
...If a moron asks you to tie yourself up with a rope and pass the key—don't do it...
...There was one that was just cancelled where we had to do jazz improvisation in support of team-building...
...They must also utter "Argghhhh" before each throw just to further humiliate themselves, cueing the hoi polloi that everyone has "permission to play...
...He's the face of fun," says Jayla...
...That way, they can say, if a concerned client calls, "Yes, we did notice that, and wrote it down...
...Matt Sanders, a manager, sits in his office, a mini-cowboy hat attached to a headband adorning his head...
...And that's all at just one com-pany—Aquascape, a supplier to pond-builders based in St...
...Anything you think might be offensive...
...Since the advent of modern management consulting, a chapter that arguably began with the founding of the industry's 800-lb gorilla, McKinsey & Company, in the 1920s, the business world has cleaved into two halves: Those paid to work for a living, and those paid to come to your office, take lots of notes, run up expenses on your dime, and then file reports in impenetrable consul-tant-ese describing your shortcomings—how, for instance, you failed to incentivize your brand pyramid and now need to drill down on the granularity of your mind-share while on-ramping your knowledge-process outsourcing...
...Fun" is the cure-all for anything that ails your company...
...tive client after making a deal with one of his employees that if the latter lost 70 pounds, the management team would dress as superheroes for a day...
...Recess was always my best subject...
...After all, who could stand to read yet another profile of the ubiquitous IPO-enriched dot-commissar, who'd get the toe of his footie-pajamas (which he wore in his nonhier-archical workspace) caught in the brake of his indoor Razor scooter, causing him to bump into the Pachinko-machine/copier, making him spill his Tazoberry Creme Frappuccino all over the conference-room foosball table...
...They wear shorts and flip-flops and other casual-wear, as it's something of a beach day for them...
...But there's always a point to be made, and he weaves valuable insights, motivational messages, and powerful teaching into his tall tales...
...If Funsters see anything inappropriate, "they have to fill out a form" that would say, for instance: "Matt dropped his balloon and Jayla bumped into him in a way that might be construed as inappropriate...
...I make my way into HBCS to spy a look at their call center, where telephone operator after telephone operator sits in a drably lit matrix of cubicles, trying to cadge money from sick people and their families in eight-hour shifts, expected by management to hit quotas, as one automated call after another rolls in...
...Armed with nothing but business-book cliches and a desire to be loved (he is nearly incapable of firing a person, or "counseling them out," in the current parlance), Michael fancies himself a fun guy, an entertainer...
...My pulse quickens as I spy the letters "TA" on one nearby building, since everyone knows T&A=fun...
...Humor, when used and managed effectively, can make your employees more productive cogs in your corporate machine...
...And the Romans were so work-averse that they outsourced all they could to slaves...
...Emblazoned on its cover was "Fun...
...She looks at me wearily...
...There are 18 pages of similar stories to instruct and inspire employers to keep their employees happy at all costs, because happy employees make for happy customers...
...Housed in a nondescript brown-brick building, HBCS is surrounded by acre after acre of similarly anonymous looking office parks, places with seemingly identical topiary and opaque names that betray nothing about the kind of business actually being transacted...
...Still, she says, "We're crazy people...
...Fishing rubber duckies out of a baby pool isn't my idea of fun, but I learned something...
...He thinks for a second, then says, "I got nuthin...
...And they said 'no.' Sooooo—hands up, hands down...
...We thought long and hard about adding that to our repertoire," says Jayla...
...Afterwards, they shove off for nearby New Castle, Delaware, where they will bring the fun to HBCS, which stands for Hospital Billing & Collection Service...
...And it is hard to argue with the salutary effects of enjoying yourself, even and especially at work...
...So how do you do that now...
...Unlike many other fun-sultants, to the Fun Department's credit, they go extremely light on the "OD," or organizational development—the cloying morals-of-the-story that usually follow such teambuilding exercises...
...Minneapolis bridge collapse=not fun...
...But if you come across buzzwords like "excellence" and "leadership," you should know that your corporate culture is sadly behind the curve—those terms are as '90s as Reebok Pumps, Zima, and Total Quality Management...
...If we took away all the bullshit jobs, our economy would collapse...
...During their initial meeting, the head of HR told him that they'd just recently filled a coworker's office with packing peanuts on his birthday...
...In the hospitality tent on a narrow spit of grass behind their building, there is lots of maritime decor: seashell fans, buckets of sand, plastic crabs, and starfish...
...Several human resources types collect around me and drape a visitor's badge around my neck as if I'm a creature from another planet...
...There's only so many hours in a day, and we've got to get so much work done...
...Any Genesis subscriber knows that hard toil was originally conceived as a curse, God breaking the news to Adam that he'd be forced to stop lounging naked while snacking on fresh fruit, and that meals would now be served by the sweat of his brow...
...As a fun-killer, it'd bring me some pleasure to report nobody had any fun...
...She indicates Fred would be an immediate target...
...The partners "take the work out of your fun" with a "turnkey fun infusion for your business...
...God knows he's earned it: Every typical corporate geek groans when we have to participate in these outings or events...
...and "Welcome to the fun...
...But he couldn't write anymore, he said...
...The medical literature, often brandished by funsultants, is unanimous on the health benefits of laughter (though nobody has yet looked into the possible detrimental effects of forced laughter brought on by leadership-institute raps...
...They'd say oh my gosh, here they come, it's the fun department...
...I ask...
...But all the categories revolved around things like privacy information and patient claims...
...No touching," says Jayla...
...We have to be very careful...
...I suggest to Kutney that what the American worker really wants, more than anything, is to see his boss get hit with something...
...Beneath that was a photo of Jonathan Bush, the CEO of athenahealth, which helps medical practices interact with insurers...
...One of the things we've learned is, I'll be at an event, and some of my colleagues will be in that moment, because they're trained to be Funsters...
...On the other hand, he emails, "It occurs to me how completely spoiled we are as workers...
...Fred's a fun-killer...
...Or perhaps Buford IP Fudd-whacker would be more to your liking...
...One half of the managerial team that wins is Paul Kutney...
...Gift certificates were awarded...
...In my group, we don't," he says...
...Should be completely ridiculous...
...So you get episodes like "Beach Games," in which Michael, wearing his Sandals Resorts T-shirt, insists that his employees all load up the "Par-taayyyy Bus" for a day at the beach...
...When 1 ask him what all this means, he strikes an optimistic note: "When you and I were born, there were 2 billion people in the world...
...Witness the August issue of Inc...
...magazine fun issue has just come out, and even though they're not in it, Jayla says they consider it a "validation of concept...
...A laughing employee more quickly forgets the worthlessness of his existence and gets on to the daily drudgery...
...He sees the upside of it, he says...
...So you might hire someone like Ronald Culberson, who heads FUNsulting, Etc., "injecting humor into healthcare" (the u's in his logo are shaped like a smile...
...He says such displays let the employees see "our management group is actually human...
...They might do something like stage suitcase races at a New Year's Eve party (racing down the street with suitcases), and Jayla would always be on the picnic committee...
...That's our job...
...On the call floor, Brian Wasilewski, VP of operations, is crisply dressed, his plaid shorts and brown beach shirt looking as though they've been starched...
...So there's the CEO ripping his shirt off and swinging it over his head...
...Thanks partly to Dave, the Phanatic is now in the Mascot Hall of Fame, even if Dave's father once called his son "a green transvestite...
...To find out who the lucky candidates are, the Funsters play "hands up/hands down...
...And they're like, 'Oh my God, look at that guy!' And here's me (yelling) 'HR...
...How so, I ask...
...cripple flopping around on the ground trying to grab cash with his teeth=not fun...
...Consequently, the Fun Department deliberates over what games to play...
...About the closest our bosses come to official levity is the "inspirational" poster in the mailroom...
...I don't ever remember my dad or any of his friends having fun at work...
...He says though they've hired the Fun Department to fun up their company picnic, they try to keep it fun year round...
...A full 70 percent of Internet porn consumption takes place during office hours, and perhaps much of the rest of the time is dedicated to crafting Internet parodies, such as this one by one "Robert Moore," who apes the rhetoric of a funsul-tant, saying employers can make the workplace more fun by having "Tick Days" ("place ticks on the necks of your staff...
...There are rubber chickens, Frisbee tosses, mustache-growing contests, pet psychics, interoffice memos alligator-clipped to toy cars, and ceremonies that honor employees for such accomplishments as having "the most animated hand gestures...
...There is, of course, a consultant for everything these days...
...As a company that boasts of its value-added services utilizing advanced technology, whose experienced technical staff builds rugged interfaces that support financial efforts through the use of industry standards and web-based protocols, and who are proud as all get-out of their HIPAA (Health Insurance Iortability and Accountability Act) compliance with government guidelines and requirements related to standard electronic transaction processes and integrity controls, they don't exactly scream: Barrel of Monkeys...
...It's a bike with five seats in a circle...
...They boast an impressive client roster, everyone from DuPont to AstraZeneca to QVC...
...I make a living writing about funsultants...
...As I get the Montepulciano flowing (wine=fun), Jayla tells me about how she got into the "funnertainment" business...
...With the benefit of hindsight, we can all now agree that the real fun was watching dot-com execs ride their Segways to the unemployment line...
...Her title is Marketing Maven (nobody in the company has a traditional title...
...You can sense a Funster sigh of relief (people grabbing as much cash as they can=fun...
...Sanjay Gupta do an adulatory piece on their company (publicity=fun...
...She is bouncy, perky, tall, and blonde, with sculpted tan legs that start just above her ankles and end right below her clavicle...
...while employees, blinking into the blinding sunlight, smile nervously, as a DJ booms "Takin' Care of Business" by Bachman-Turner Overdrive...
...You crotchety old curmudgeons...
...If they are done poorly, they are bad beyond your wildest journalistic dreams...
...We engage them," she says, adding with icy, assassin-like resolve...
...It's a variation on heads or tails, which the Funsters used to play by having everybody grab their heads or tails...
...Dave later tells me that at AstraZeneca, the pharmaceutical company, the Fun Department has even taken over the company's seldom-used lactation room, dressed it up as a doctor's office complete with a doctor character and a gum-cracking assistant, and wrote "prescriptions to play" while treating people "for terminal seriousness...
...One of the finalists in hands up/hands down is in a wheelchair...
...People I never met before coming and saying, 'Hey Matt, I want a hat.'" For some reason, this makes me want to cry...
...So I have to be a prick...
...But who am I to judge...
...A smiling employee masks his discontent and horror from potential clients...
...magazine, the self-declared "Handbook of the American Entrepreneur...
...Yet they're unable to escape the condescending infantilization of their workplaces, the coercive "fun," the forced-march through the land of clenched-teeth joviality that so often takes place under the dreaded guise of "team building...
...Another friend in the information technology sector lays it bare on background, since frowning on "funtivi-ties" is considered very bad form by upper management...
...But that's just the beginning...
...Jayla is a hardcore marketer...
...The Funsters go through Dave's Fun Boot Camp, and memorize the Funster training manual, where they learn the ins and outs of presenting fun, and also the no-no's...
...They've beat the system...
...We are all participating in mandatory fun activities...
...But Mark says they had to modify it...
...Iutting on my skeptic's hat, perhaps having never taken it off, I tell Jayla that it's well and good to have fun, but surely everybody doesn't subscribe to their brand of it...
...Perks include on-campus wallyball courts, indoor soccer fields, air hockey, ping pong, billiards, yoga and aerobics classes, company pools and hot tubs, and Native-American themed nap rooms so that employees can sleep (sleep...
...Bush was tearing his shirt apart to reveal a Batman costume underneath, the same costume in which he gave a full presentation to a prospecMatt Labash is a senior writer at The Weekly Standard...
...They are riding high, standing around a television set at a local gathering place/gym, high-five-ing each other after having to wait through all the dreary news to watch CNN's Dr...
...They say cheery things like "Nice hat, girlfriend...
...Today there are 6 billion...
...So Jayla and Nick started thinking about providing a "turnkey solution" for companies who wanted to fun-up the workplace...
...Not fun...
...But that was one where even the dumber people who actually enjoyed Forrest Gump were complaining about how gay it was...
...I turn to another old friend of mine, much more steeped in business culture than I am...
...It's cutting off my circulation...
...After all, plenty of surveys show that people are pretty good at fostering their own fun at work and yet still remain a largely unsatisfied lot...
...Fun-tivities...
...Or you could hire "Energy Expert" Gail Hahn of Fun-cilitators, who can help you practice "Fun Shui," conduct some "Out of the Box Olympics" for teambuilding, and who is "authorized to lead laughter sessions sanctioned by the World Laughter Tour...
Vol. 13 • September 2007 • No. 1
