The new Plague, Inc?

I don’t say this very often, but today was a really fun day at work.

Myself and several of my same-level colleagues were asked to have an afternoon virtual get-together, to swap ideas for upcoming ‘keymark dates’ and to brainstorm ways to make Those Above Us and their shareholders yet more money. Personally, I’d like to see the back of the Summer holidays before having to think about Hallowe’en and Christmas, but there we are…

Anyway, by way of protest, or simply through sheer laziness, or maybe because we’re all childish, we spent 80% of the time playing an online game. We were unsupervised, because Head Office decided ‘leaving you to converse without input from us will, we believe, bring a more open-minded honesty to the discussion and ultimately benefit the company forthwith’. They probably couldn’t be bothered, quite frankly, and had chosen to spend the day changing their hair colour or furthering their knowledge of local spas or wineries. Either way, they left us to get on with it, so we ended up ignoring what we were supposed to be doing and played a really fun game called “CODENAMES” instead. It’s quite hard to describe, but basically you have two teams working against each other. There are a list of ‘code words’ onscreen, half of which belong to one team and half of which apply to the others. Each team has one ‘Spy Master’ who knows which words are applicable to their team, and their job is to help them guess which they are by giving them a one-word clue that links two or more of the words. I feel as if I’ve lost the thread there a bit in explaining it, so I would urge you to look it up yourselves because there are lots of explanatory videos available, and long YouTube clips of American gamers playing it. (I know because I spent the rest of the day, post-meeting, watching them).

We had a blast. We swapped around a lot, but I think the team I was on won at least as many times as it lost, and I will forever be proud of myself for using the word POTTER to link the words PHOENIX and STONE. Unfortunately, my teammates were not on my wavelength and we lost that game.  But still…

I have already suggested we have a game with Ted and Beryl’s various offsprings, instead of another Zoom quiz, and I thoroughly intend to put the board game version on my Christmas/birthday list.  In the meantime, my fellow sub-division-under-managers and I are planning to have a weekly game every Tuesday afternoon for the foreseeable future. We see it as a team-building exercise, a great way to bond between different workplaces, and a necessary break from the drudgery of our daily tasks. Well - that’s what we plan to say when Head Office get a flag up from their IT department and find out how we’ve been spending our ‘Meeting’ time….

RC 25-8-20