There's Always a Douchebag

In an effort to boost morale in my office, management began imposing "Team Building" events. Want to know the fastest way to get a bunch of adults to act like whiny, bratty children? A team building event!

Every quarter, each manager within the silo of the department organizes an event. So far we've done:
- Miniature Golf (at in indoor, black-lit location)
- Random group strategy games (i.e. like putting together pieces of a puzzle) in an outdoor park
- Duck Pin Bowling

They force us onto mini teams to encourage people across groups in the silo to get to know each other. The problem? People generally stick together through the activity but as soon as its over and it turns into social hour, everyone flocks to their well-known associates. Not much team building.

This quarter's event was just announced and its forcing us to work in our "teams" over the course of a month. I applaud them for trying something different but the event? A scavenger hunt. Every week, we're given a set of things we must obtain and if we complete the list, we'll get a puzzle piece. In a month, the pieces will all give way to some clue that we must solve and there's some sort of party.

So - its not terribly exciting... especially since I wanted to go paintballing but it could be worse, I guess.

My problem? While I like 4 out of the 5 teams members (all randomly selected)... the other one is a total douchebag. This guy was adamant about setting up an official meeting to strategize how we'd accomplish the following tasks:

Week 1 Items(ending 3/20):
1 - Picture of team eating lunch in office cafeteria
2 - How tall is the office building?
3 - Proof that all team members wore some green on 3/17
4 - What letter/number combo must you enter to get a snickers bar from the vending machine at the [other office] this week?
5 - A business card from one of the managers in [Business Partner Dept] with a signature

None of this is terribly difficult. I'm embarrassed to admit that I'm incredibly competitive so I'm determined to be the winning group but I'm not going to be a tool about it. So, douchebag wanted to go through and figure out how we were going to accomplish all of the above tasks. And I'm not joking. We had a MEETING, in a conference room, to determine this.

Task 1 - this ended up being a debate between he and I over how this should be accomplished. One of our team members, who is a telecommuter the majority of the time because she lives an hour and a half away from the office, will be at an off-site training course all next week. I argued that we should just take her picture NOW while she's in the office. The task didn't specify that it had to be a picture of all of us together. I'm a business analyst. Its my job to pick apart "requirements". Geezy peezy.

This guy argued with me and sniped, "Well - this is a TEAM building activity. You have to PRESUME that we must do these things together!" He asked the telecommuter how far the training site was and requested that she drive over here during her lunch hour for a photo. So basically he's asked her to give up her lunch and inconvenience herself even more because he's not willing to think outside the box. We spent a good 10 minutes going back and forth about this. Seriously.

Task 2 - oh.my.god. How difficult can it really be to find out the height of a building?! You ask the facilities management. Wow - tough, huh? Douchebag was adamant about locating the LAND records despite the fact that I TOLD him those records don't include property specs. They include LAND specs. He just wasn't listening. He even suggested that we all take a trip to the Towson courthouse to obtain the records.

I think a blood vessel may have popped at this point.

Task 3 - The fabulous Ms. CAG is in Vegas this week (lucky girl!) so she won't be in the office on Monday. Again - nowhere in that sentence does it state we have to wear green IN THE OFFICE. He was freaking out! I told him I'd call CAG and tell her to wear green, snap a photo and e-mail it to me. This isn't rocket science.

Task 4 - not difficult. We all agreed.

Task 5 - Oy! This guy panicked, "How are we going to possibly get this done?" Okay, our silo partners with this department for projects. How does he NOT know a manager in that group? I know at least 4.

Ack! Why am I getting so angry at a lame team building event?

Sometimes I think I would really benefit from anger management or another form of therapy.