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From 2009 to 2015 I worked in management for a large retail chain, and one of the requirements of this job was that once a year I got shipped to some resort/conference center to sit through a week of tedious vendor presentations, awkward team-building exercises, and corporate rah-rah sessions in the interest of morale-building and capacity-boosting. My second-to-last year with the company, the event was held in Nashville, which means that every one of the presentations had some stupid country theme that involved the presenters dressing up in cowboy hats, screaming "yee-haw" upon entering the room, referring to the people in the room as "part'nr" -- that sort of thing. Our first presentation on the first day was by the "corporate services team," which was the group of upper management employees in charge of the services (rather than the inventory) portion of the business. As luck would have it, our group also happened to contain -- in addition to the managers and assorted leadership personnel from my district -- the regional vice president and various other corporate drones that had everyone walking on eggshells the entire time. Essentially the corporate services guys' direct supervisors.
Like everyone else that week, they began their presentation by storming into the room shouting "yee-haw" and "giddyup, y'all" and other Howdy-Doody cliches. As they entered the room and made their little production, Kid Rock's "Cowboy" blasted on the stereo, and the intro culminated with the entire group of 5 people shouting "COWBOY BABY!" in unison. It was 7:15 in the morning. Once the intro was over, they turned the sound down, and it looped quietly and mostly inaudibly in the background for most of the rest of the session.
Throughout the presentation, the presenters attempted to engage the group in the form of some call-response rah-rah bullshit: "And what are we gonna do about it!" "BE A COWBOY, BABY!" or something silly like that. It made sense in the context of the presentation, sort of. Of course, nobody really played along with this: even the corporate VP guys who always seemed to eat this crap up couldn't be bothered. There were maybe 5 or 6 instances during the presentation where the audience was prompted to do this, the response rarely rising above a few unenthusiastic voices.
Near the end of the session, you could tell they were wrapping up, and they all attempted the call-response one last time: "And what are we gonna do about it?!" At this point, the guy that was leading the presentation walked over to the stereo and cranked the volume back up, presumably expecting the "COWBOY BABY!" refrain as well as an enthusiastic response from the group. Instead, the group was silent, and he fortuitously pumped the volume up right at the exact moment where Kid Rock says, "Get west coast pussy for my Detroit playaz!" Every one of their faces went white as a ghost, and the dirty looks coming from all the corporate VP types were fantastic, all seeming to say, "Really, you fucking idiots?" As things that happen at corporate conferences go, it was pretty amusing.
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