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Except for those people who are dead inside (you know who you are), anyone who has ever worked in an office has a Dilbert story. Or, if you never followed that comic strip, perhaps you think of it as a story straight out of The Office. The two are virtually interchangeable. In honor of the recent passing of Scott Adams, here is mine.
About a million years ago, give or take a decade or so, I worked in an office at a naval shipyard. It was a very high-stress job. Lots of pressure, long hours, meetings frequently devolving into shouting matches, etc. Just a barrel of laughs. At the beginning of the Clinton Administration, they decided to close down the shipyard. It wasn't that we weren't good at what we were doing. It was just a cost-cutting measure. It came down to closing us or closing Pearl Harbor, and of course, Pearl Harbor had history on its side, so we lost out.
You might expect that impending unemployment would throw a damper on the work environment, and it did to some extent, but we were all used to pressure, so we struggled on. Our management, however, was quite concerned that someone would bring a gun to work and start shooting people, so our boss decided to show some initiative and arrange a stress management seminar. He got one of the guys in our office (Ron, the one guy in our office who didn't think the whole idea was stupid) to find someone to lead it. Within a few weeks, it was on the calendar. As you can imagine, we were all thrilled.
So the time came. All ten of us or so crammed into the extremely small cell we called our conference room. I will say that the guy Ron found was quite good. If I remember correctly, he'd written a book on the subject. The whole thing might have actually not been a complete waste of your tax dollars, except that there is always ONE GUY. In this instance, Jack thought the whole thing was idiotic, more so than any of the rest of us, and he took the opportunity to express his displeasure every couple of minutes or so. When the leader tried to get us to share our feelings or organize an exercise, Jack openly mocked the plan and the guy trying to run it.
To his credit, the leader handled the situation about as well as it could be handled, but Ron was quietly fuming. You could actually see his face turning from pink to red to purple. Finally, he leaped out of his chair and yelled at Jack, "Why don't you sit down and shut up!"
Jack was already sitting down, but he suddenly got very quiet, smiled, stood up, and almost in a whisper said, "Make me!" So Ron dived across the table and several of us had to grab him and Jack, who really wasn't actually doing anything except laughing. The conflict was over in less than a minute — I suppose we could have continued the seminar, but our boss decided that the magic of the moment was broken, so we all went back to work.
The leader still got paid, so we still managed to waste your tax dollars. You're welcome.
A fight broke out at a stress management seminar. I'm not sure even Scott Adams could have imagined that.
Discussion (16)
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Was Jack usually that guy?
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I always thought there was too much stress on stress in the workplace.
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Yup. Great sense of humor, though. I really liked him.
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That’s hilarious.
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For a couple of years, I worked at a warehouse that had two satellite warehouses out in the country. Every day, a couple of guys (I was often one) had to go out to the satellite warehouses to pull parts for customer orders. The old van we drove had cheap, non-brand-name tires that were fine in the summer, but sucked in the winter. You might get stuck in less than an inch of snow, even though they weren't bald or nearly bald.
One day, I had the opportunity to speak with the company president, who was the wife of the CEO and owner. I told her how often we would get stuck in the winter and that the warehouse manager adamantly rejected my suggestion that we buy a set of winter tires. This was in Fargo, North Dakota, where winter lasts from Thanksgiving to Easter, so I wasn't asking for something that was ridiculous. She said yes, of course, we should do that. I told the warehouse manager, and he was still incredibly resistant to spending the money. Eventually, after a lot of back-and-forth, we made the purchase, and those new winter tires never let us down.
But the fact that the warehouse manager kept resisting it, even when the company president authorized the purchase, made me think of a particular episode of The Office. In one of the later seasons, after Michael Scott left, the new boss was Robert California. Andy Bernard was his right-hand man. One day, Mrs. California decides she would like to work at Dunder-Mifflin. Robert California tells her that he would love that, but it's up to Andy. In front of Mrs. California, Robert asks Andy if he could find some role for her to play, but behind her back, he threatens Andy and says he absolutely doesn't want his wife working there.
Throughout this winter tire episode, I thought of The Office and wondered if the CEO talked to the warehouse manager and told him that no matter what his wife says, he damn well doesn't want to spend hundreds of dollars, but not to tell anyone that he said that.
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Another not-so-funny story about that van. One day, when I pulled into the parking lot at the main warehouse, there was a loud bang, and the front left corner of the van dropped hard, as if I had driven into the mother of all potholes. I got out, and there was no gap between the wheel opening and the tire. The body in that corner was sitting on the tire. There was no pothole; it was just time for that A-arm in the suspension to break. Later that day, I sent a text message to the guy who had been the mechanic until a week or so earlier, telling him about the incident.
He said that the A-arm had been broken previously and had been welded back together, when it should have been replaced with a new one. He and the manager always knew that someday it would probably break again. It was just my good luck that it happened when I was driving 5 mph and not out on the road, going 55 mph.
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