The giant office time suck

You think the NCAA tournament results in millions of lost work hours each year? (My pick in the pool, by the way: UCLA over Tennessee.) That's a drop in the bucket compared to the shenanigans a-brewin' when the office United Way campaign cranks up.

I have nothing against the United Way. They do good work, and I've heard that most of the dough they raise goes directly to charitable aid, rather than mailings or overhead. That's super. But holy shit, the sheer amount of time and effort offices like mine put into their annual UW drive is jaw-dropping.

My office is conducting the following over the next 10 days: barbecue lunch, multiple bake sales, poker tournament, theme baskets, 2-on-2 basketball tournament (in which Alejandro and I will avenge our last-second loss from last year), an unholy abomination called Penny Wars, a potluck dinner, and of course the outright asking for money. All of which are announced - often multiple times per day - via companywide e-mail blasts featuring 1 MB worth of gaudy graphics that instantly crash the Outlook server.

I would bet that if you add up the employee hours dedicated to planning, announcing, executing, recovering from and self-congratulating over these events and compare that to the actual dollar amount raised, the company would come out ahead by simply writing a check for the same sum to the United Way. But then we would be deprived of stuffing a five-spot into the Penny War jar of those bastards in Advertising.

• Posted by Brian at 11:16 PM
• Comments (0)
• Category: Rant