Are We Having Fun Yet?
(Page 6 of 7)
Mar.-Apr. 2008
by Matt Labash, from the Weekly Standard
The culminating funtivity is a two-person cash grab on a Twister-like mat; they stuff as much money into their various pockets, shirtfronts, and orifices as humanly possible. To find out who the lucky candidates are, the Funsters play “hands up/hands down.” It’s a variation on heads or tails, which the Funsters used to play by having everybody grab their heads or tails. But Mark says they had to modify it. “We had a client who was a little challenged by the political incorrectness,” he explains. “[He said], ‘We don’t want our employees to put their hands on their tails, even if it’s their own tails.’ We said we can play heads or hips. And he said no. Sooooo—hands up/hands down.”
RELATED CONTENT
There’s a dark side to the recent trend in corporate repsonsiblity: It is giving conscientious inve...
Your Logo Here March 12, 2003 Issue By Rob Walker, Slate The “Sponsorship” exhibit, which opened a...
Asserting Democratic Control of Food and Agriculture June 28, 2002 Issue By Julie Madsen Asserting...
These anti-globalization activists are reaching for change......
Multinational corporations are urging people to buy “local,” meaning from huge multinational corpor...
One of the finalists in hands up/hands down is in a wheelchair. But after he incorrectly guesses up when the Funsters call down, he is eliminated. You can sense a Funster sigh of relief (people grabbing as much cash as they can = fun; cripple flopping around on the ground trying to grab cash with his teeth = not fun).
The afternoon heat is sweltering, and by the end of the playfair, HBCS’s chief financial officer is in a magnanimous mood and lets everybody go home, though it’s only 3:00 p.m. As a fun-killer, it would bring me some pleasure to report that nobody had any fun. But that wouldn’t be true. 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 (it was a good party but not that good).
So who’s to say the funsultants are worse than anything else that’s happened to the American corporate drone over the decades? After all the paradigm shifting and diversity training and outsourcing and synergizing and empowering and value adding and globalizing and downsizing and full-frontal lobotomizing, maybe finger puppets are just the logical terminus.
As for the funsultants themselves, they’re truly living the American dream. They’ve beat the system. As Lord of the Deal Mark Doughty explains, “I work very hard not to have a real job.” Is that the work ethic that made America great? Probably not. But who am I to judge? I make a living writing about funsultants.
For insight, I turn to another old friend of mine, much more steeped in business culture than I am. He’s my college buddy Don McKinney, a creative director/advertising hotshot responsible for campaigns like Nissan’s “Shift.” When I 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. Today there are 6 billion. 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. If we took away all the bullshit jobs, our economy would collapse.”
Page:
<< Previous 1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
5 | 6 |
7 |
Next >>