Some ideas are just bad

I've just come back from a couple of days in Stockholm. Every two years, the department I work in for my employer has a national get together. Why, I have no idea. There are 7 or 8 of us who travel from our local office, and we spend the next 2 days sitting together listening to presentations we aren't the slightest bit interested in, eating together at meal times, and drinking together in the bar during the evening. We might as well be in the staff lunch room at home. The exact same theatre is played out amongst those groups from other offices. I hate these things. Swedes are pretty up to date with global trends, but they've missed the boat on a couple of things. One of those is the idea of "team building". It's a national sport in Sweden. You can't move without tripping over some kind of group activity designed to help us all get in touch with our feminine sides.

Bugger off.

I'm 46 years old. I already know who I like, and I know who I don't like. Do they seriously think that using some deadbeat in a dayglow orange T shirt to force me to spend 2 hours building a pyramid out of people I wouldn't normally cross the street to say hello to is going to change the way I feel about them or the way they feel about me ? Call me old fashioned, but I have this fanciful notion that one goes to work to do a job. I'm not in the least bit interested in becoming best mates with everyone I work with. I have some really good work buddies. I also work with some people who I think are a complete waste of space. That's the way people are. Why there is the need to waste 2 days of time and money on some misguided attempt to try to change the nature of mankind, I'll never understand.

Maybe I see things through different eyes. I've been working for 20 years. Long enough to know that there are other things in life besides work, and that pretty much all of those things are infinitely more important than work. I don't work because I want to, I work because I need to. If I suddenly inherited millions, they wouldn't see me for dust. So my philosophy is to get in there, get the job done, try to have a happy time in the process, and then get out of there so that I can do the things that really matter to me. I'm not in the least bit interested in building a life around my job. I already have a pretty good life. And I don't want some stranger trying to make me buddies with everyone. If I want more friends then I'm big enough and ugly enough to find them for myself thank you very much.

Sweden, you're 15 years out of date with this whole "team building" fascination. The rest of the world has figured out that people don't give a shit. Time to get with the programme. If it wasn't for the free food and the chance to get plastered in the bar at night, I'd be staging a mutiny. But instead I think I'll probably resort to throwing a sickie next time the subject comes up.