I really hate anything that is popular. You can go all the way back to AOL as the #1 internet service for that foundation to be built as it was the lamest thing yet it was the most popular. There’s plenty of more examples throughout the decades: boy bands, twitter, ICQ, soccer/world football, vaccines. Whenever anything is suspiciously popular, I head in the opposite direction. I don’t give a shit if everyone is doing it. I even apply that to some video games just to piss people off such as Final Fantasy where people have meltdowns if you don’t play it/like it. haha. Let me give you another great example: Cold Play. My friends and I liked them before they were popular; then they hit it big time and became lame because everyone likes them. Fuck I even applied that to U2 when everyone was having a splosion to them in the 1990s.
Anyway, fuck Escape Rooms. Every lamer decided hey a great team-building event is, LET’S GO TO AN ESCAPE ROOM! I really think the base concept is cool where there’s a historical/themed room full of puzzles. I really like the creativity of the rooms people create or the puzzle levels. What I don’t like is everyone working together to solve the puzzle or dbags using it as team-building event. These marketing fucks thought they would do a VIRTUAL ESCAPE room during covid, which sadly, that thing actually exists.
I mean look at this shit:
I have even now seen a horror movie on escape rooms and lots of TV shows have episodes about them.
I managed to get out of the VIRTUAL ESCAPE ROOM TEAM EVENT…along with getting out of every other stupid ass team-building event people tried to pull besides Paint Ball which was awesome. The boss basically said you’re “gay” or “not a man” if you don’t go to paintball. He said it was required. Which isn’t at all politically correct in a business setting today but was passable in the 2009-2014s. He was in a position where no one could ever fight back against something like that. But I respected how he forced everyone to “man up” and attend and fight it out. Especially when your financial product is virtual characters killing each other. But as time progressed, the rebels launched a board game sideshow where they refused to participate and it swelled to like 40% non-participants. haha. Then it just died but it lasted until 2014 or so.
The most cliche team-building is the fall with trust thing. They do it on TV, even to make fun of team-building events. Wine & Painting is OK if you drink but if you don’t drink it’s kinda pointless IMO.
Way back they had about 15 years of movie team events. They were enjoyable but we saw tons of completely shitty movies that were a waste of our time. It’s hard to time a GOOD MOVIE release with team event. I had to fucking see EPISODE 1 three times as a team event. haha. The worst movie we saw was Dungeons & Dragons (where we all cheered when the characters die much to the surprise of the non-team members in the theater) OR we saw THE HULK which was complete garbage. I think we saw “XXX” and Tomb Raider which were also crap.
One of my favorite team events was Booze Cruise or Cruise to Catalina. I don’t drink but the boat ride was awesome. We took a slow as fuck boat to Catalina one time only to discover we went to the lame part of Catalina where there was nothing to do whatsoever. The highlight was just a shitty convenience store which you coulda literally stayed at home and gone 1 block over for the same experience. But it was fun. We did around the bay cruises several times and it was awesome except for the one time, the leader decided to have actual WORK meetings on the boat. Which was fucking lame as fuck. I mean who wants to have a work meeting on a boat around the bay. They must have had to justify the trip somehow using that. I guess it’s better than being in the office but it’s still a waste of the boat time.
Besides that, the coolest thing I heard about was THROW AXES team event. You go somewhere and you throw axes. I never did it. I do have a few of that fixes though for future usage.
Anyway, the goal is to bring team members together so they perform better at work. That’s certainly OK and I don’t disagree with that. But people make fucking lame sections in their team-building event choices. Then if you’re stuck on a team with a bunch of lamers, you get stuck going to a lame event that is forced by the company. I think there were some times where they threaten you with “going to work” instead, which was actually a better choice than some of their selections.
GG