Thank You Sir, May I Have Another?

One of the reasons I decided to go into law (despite my highly marketable philosophy degree) was that I hate the business world. Don’t get me wrong, I like business law – U.C.C. § 2-207 gives me a fucking hard-on – but there’s something about business itself that annoys me at an almost existential level. Mostly, I think it’s the buzzword laden, team-building, motivational bullshit. The only time I want to shift my paradigm is if it’s getting in the way of achieving synergy on the boss’s desk with my proactive secretary. Seriously, fuck that shit. I have very little patience for listening to some over-cheerful douchebag drone on about mission statements when I could actually be doing something “productive.”

I mean, it’s not like a pointless seminar is going to make a fucking difference anyway. If you haven’t bonded with your co-workers during the normal course of interacting, you’re sure as shit not going to do it by putting together a fucking puzzle that symbolizes how each unit in the company must interlock with the others pointless your existence is.

If corporations really want to create loyal and cohesive teams, what they should do is bring in a fraternity pledgemaster to haze the fuck out of their employees. Seriously. Nothing brings a group together like common adversity, and fraternity hazing is about as adverse as you can get without going to boot camp.

You want to build trust? Fuck that stupid fall-backward-and-I’ll-stand-behind-and-catch-you shit. Try tying your dick to a cinderblock and trusting your partner to have left enough string when you drop it. You want people to learn your mission statement? Get a trough full of ice water, pour in salt to lower the freezing temperature, and make your employees strip down to their boxers and partner up. When one guy has to sit in the tub until the other recites your mission statement perfectly, word-for-word, they’ll fucking memorize it like their balls depend on it (since, they sort of do). Believe me, your employees will bond for life when they’re sitting under a table covered by a tarp and can’t leave until they smoke an entire pack of Swisher-Sweets and eat a whole raw onion. They’ll be reminiscing for years to come about that time Jimmy from Accounting ate an entire stick of butter to save them from getting paddled, or the time they bet their Christmas bonus that Helena from Marketing wouldn’t drink a bottle of piss and lost.

Sure, there are probably “laws” against this sort of thing. But if you’re going to be indicted eventually anyway, wouldn’t you rather have a better story to tell in the slammer – that you got busted for making your employees eat goldfish – than for something lame like “embezzlement”? And if you did get indicted, wouldn’t the prosecutor really be indicting the whole corporate system? And if the whole corporate system is guilty, then wouldn’t it really be an indictment of free enterprise in general? I put it to you, my faithful readers – wouldn’t this be an indictment of our entire American society?

Well, I’m not going to sit here and listen to you badmouth the United States of America. Gentlemen!

[LI walks out humming the Star-Spangled Banner]

Seriously though, I’m not going to sit here. I’m going to go sit at a fucking bar and drink beer with my friends.

Fuck it.

(Hat tip: Bama Girl, for the conversational inspiration)