Last week we talked about office contests gone awry. Here are 13 of the funniest stories you shared.
1. The bugs
Early in my career as a software engineer, the company wanted to improve the quality of the software products. They offered cash bonuses to the testing teams for finding bugs, and cash bonuses to the developers if the bugs were fixed within a week. As you might expect, the developers started planting bugs in the code so they could get the bonus for fixing them.
Unfortunately, testing rarely catches all of the bugs. Quality dropped and complaints jumped as customers found the bugs that the testers missed.
2. The squirrel
When I worked for a city government, I served a stint on the Employee Advisory Committee (we hosted parties, fundraisers, blood drives, charity runs, etc. for employees, as a means of keeping everyone slightly happier, I guess). Anyway, one time we tried a “cutest pet” contest. I don’t even think we awarded prizes; it was just something to do and distract ourselves for a week from the monotony of issuing building permits and renewing driver’s licenses. All we asked was for participants to email a photo of their pet, then we sent out an email with all the pictures compiled and asked employees to vote for their favorite, anonymously via an online poll. Again, it was ALL optional and I don’t think we were even giving out prizes!
One person sent in a photo of a squirrel (in a tree). I remember thinking at the time, “Huh but whatever” (I mean it’s totally reasonable that someone doesn’t actually have a pet, maybe they “adopted” their backyard squirrel … small local government workers are quirky people!). I included the squirrel pic in the mix (which was mostly dogs and cats dressed up in little outfits).
Little did I know this would fully turn into SquirrelGate – I had so many people complain that this was Unfair, Not A Legitimate Pet, Animal Cruelty, etc. THEN, some dogged detective did a reverse image search and found the photo came from a public website (I think it was like the fifth image that came up if you google “squirrel”) so the SQUIRREL WASN’T EVEN REAL, and that revelation got people even more mad. I’m absolutely not kidding – I had more departments contacting me about this damn squirrel than I had in my previous five years working for that city. We had to issue a disclaimer and remove the squirrel votes from the tabulation; it was a Whole Thing. Needless to say, it was the last cutest pet contest we put on. I think the guy who sent in the squirrel in the first place (as a troll) got exactly the reaction he was hoping for.
3. The videos
We had a contest where we were supposed to make a video about our team’s work, except there was no prize, and it wasn’t optional. Nobody wanted to do it, but if you’re going to make us, you’ll get what you get…
We filmed four of us sitting at our desks, doing our boring desk jobs, for whatever the required length of the video was. Then someone combined these into a four-way split screen. Done. That was our entry. It got what might have been the biggest laugh at the also-required viewing session, because while we certainly weren’t the only ones who thought the whole thing was stupid, we were the only ones with the chutzpah to take the assignment so literally.
4. The game
I was a grad student at a very tech-oriented university where the atmosphere was extremely competitive and the gender ratio skewed heavily male. The computers in our lab all ran a game called Hextris — like Tetris, but the tiles were hexagonal instead of square. The game would display the names and scores of the top players when you opened it, and one of the guys in the lab became absolutely obsessed with always having the top score. He would check it multiple times a day, and if anyone beat his score, he would sit and play — sometimes for hours at a time — until he was on top again.
So one of the other students hacked the game, and made it always display somebody else’s score at the top whenever this guy signed on. It drove him completely wild, and he wasted several days doing nothing but playing that stupid game (instead of, say, studying or writing his thesis) before he finally caught on.
5. The braggart
In our office, many people share a love for spicy food.
Mark (fake name of course) was one of those guys who loved to think he did everything better than other people. Did you go on vacation to Maldives? He went to Mars. Did you purchase a new laptop? His was built by Bill Gates himself, and so on.
One day, a potluck was organized to celebrate a coworker moving to another country. This person adored spicy food, so some of us prepared it. There was plenty of regular food, but to avoid incidents, the spicy one was labelled appropriately. Now, one of the dishes was a stew with a sauce made with Carolina Reapers. I was used to spicy food, but that one literally burnt my tongue. I loved it!
Once Mark saw a group of us eating that dish, he wanted to try it. We tried to warn him that it was really spicy, maybe take a small, small bite to see how you do.
He grabbed a spoon from the table, took a generous portion of the stew and proceed to smugly telling us that he was perfectly able to handle spicy food. He GULPED the entire bowl while we stared in horror (and a bit of delight in my case). Long story short, an ambulance was called after he collapsed on the floor gagging and writhing in pain.
Once he returned, he still had the gall to claim that it was indigestion and not stupidity that caught him. Someone left a small jar of Carolina Reaper extract on his desk a couple of days later since he wouldn’t drop the subject. He threw it in the bin, and never commented about it again.
6. The sweater
Last year we decided to do an office-wide Christmas sweater contest to end our holiday charity giving campaign. There were three cash prizes for the most festive sweaters. Usually, the office is pretty laid back about these type of contests and they go off without much of a fuss. This one was different.
We had a happy hour event where people voted for the sweaters anonymously. Apparently one of my coworkers was extremely upset that she did not win first place (she came in second) and she spent the entire evening insulting the first place winner. She even asked people if they wanted to redo the vote and if they should model the sweaters because there’s no way she should have lost. I couldn’t believe the other person actually agreed to the “modeling” and re-voting; they ended up strutting through the bar in their sweaters and doing the vote all over again. The complaining coworker lost a second time and spent the remainder of the evening asking us if we liked her because there’s no way we could have possibly thought the other sweater was more festive than hers.
7. The pumpkin carving contest
Each year, my company held a pumpkin carving contest. I was the organizer one year. Employees would judge the entries in various categories. If we had 10 entries, we were thrilled. It was low-stakes. It was a nonprofit organization and there were no prizes. Entrants were aware that they were competing for the glory of bragging rights. And yet…
One manager (who was no one’s favorite) told her team that her pumpkin was #6 and to vote for her. And, yes, her pumpkin was on the table next to the #6 when she dropped it off that morning, but I later needed to move the pumpkins around before the judging began and she was no longer pumpkin #6. Well. By the time she found out, her team had already voted and dutifully voted for her because she was their pushy manager. Our low-tech online polling system did not allow for re-dos. She was loudly upset at me; at the unfairness of it all. She yelled at me that she told her team to vote for #6 but that wasn’t her pumpkin! I don’t think she realized how bad this made her look. We’re talking about a person over the age of 50 who was a director of a team and who stood to gain nothing from winning this contest.
I believe that her team accidentally voted for a unicorn pumpkin painted by a very nice person in another department. (See how laid-back this was? We allowed *painted* pumpkins in a Pumpkin Carving Contest.)
8. The face mask
During Covid, my division of my company (around 150 people spread around the country) started having monthly contests and the winner would be announced during our monthly team calls. In October, the contest was “show us your favorite mask” – you know, Halloween-themed. So, as a joke, I put on a clay face mask (the kind for skin care) instead of some monster mask and emailed a photo off to the coordinator with a snarky “does this count” lol. I hit reply-all accidentally. And realized it far too late to recall it. The only balm (uh, aside from the facemask) for my mortification was I tied for the win. Was it out of pity? Probably. Don’t care – I used that $10 Amazon card like nobody’s business!
9. The leg
A corporate-sponsored speaker came in right after we were ordered to come back to the office to try and boost morale or something. None of the bosses or directors were there, having sent an email that they were working from home, which really ticked everyone off. We gave this speaker a pretty hard time, ignoring him and talking amongst ourselves. His presentations were mostly about why remote work was never going to be the norm and some stuff that was union-bustingly awkward. He tried to get us up and involved with, “Okay, who can stand on one foot the longest! Woo! Let’s get that blood pumping!” My coworker, RJ, is an amputee so he popped his leg off and left it standing, sat back down and dug a novel out of his bag and started to read. RJ is my hero.
10. The Christmas competition
I used to work for an office supplies company that held an annual Christmas decorating competition. Every department used to go all out. Lights, handmade decorations, trees etc.
One year they realized it was a bit over the top and starting to cost people, so they made a rule that only recycled goods could be used. The marketing department had a surplus of Christmas catalogues that year and spent weeks papering their area. There was a catalogue tree, catalogue snow flakes, catalogue Santa.
It looked amazing and they won. THE UPROAR. “Did any of our customers even get a catalogue or did marketing hoard them all for the competition??” The catalogues were mostly misprints, but the hours they’d put into the decorations kind of added up too. How are they “so overworked” but had time for that?
You would think that would shut the comp down, but it just got more competitive. Trees made out of old printer cartridges and reams of paper. Santa’s workshops with elaborate cardboard fittings attached to lights. Marketing tried to one up themselves and designed a full 18-hole Christmas-themed mini golf course around the office. Another team made their staff follow the judges around caroling.
I no longer work there but it was definitely becoming a hazard. You couldn’t walk two meters without tripping over some cardboard golf course or knocking a series of snowflake buntings down. Teams would spend weeks making decorations instead of working. Then by new years the recycling and by extension dumpsters would be filled with stapled painted and taped up paper decorations and cardboard.
The prize? A fish and chip lunch.
I hope they no longer go to such lengths now but the amount of time money and resources wasted on a team-building exercise was crazy.
11. The pumpkins, part 2
We have a notoriously difficult assistant, Ann, who truly has a talent for finding things to complain about. One year, we had a pumpkin decorating contest, and the pumpkins were all donated to a local kids charity after. Ann first complained that she does not believe in Halloween and this would indoctrinate the kids at the charity. She then complained that anyone who has time to decorate a pumpkin must not be doing their job. Finally, when she saw the decorated pumpkins, she complained that not enough people had entered (we had like 12), and it was an embarrassment to our organization that we couldn’t come together for the kids.
12. The snow
Several winters ago, Minnesota received a larger-than-usual snowfall. The company who plowed the area around our business ran out of room and pushed the snow from the last several snowstorms into a far corner of our parking lot. This area was shaded, so the snow took forever to melt. The owner of the company decided that whoever correctly guessed the day the snow was finally melted would receive a gift card.
The intensity with which my coworkers determined their guesses was impressive. They consulted long-range forecasts and the Farmer’s Almanac, performed simple melting tests on their coffee breaks; for a period of time, I mulled over updating our mission statement, as apparently “make money” was no longer it. Once all the guesses were in, the wait began.
Since my office window was the closest to the snow pile, I got the joy of people trudging in and out of my office all day long. Rainy days, which sped up the melt, were everyone’s nemesis. I got so tired of the contest, I mentally tabulated the length of extension cord it would take to use my hair dryer (in the dead of night) to melt that sucker and be done with it.
Who won? No one. The rule was that your guess had to be the exact day the snow was gone – not a day before or after. Only one coworker was left standing and judging by his guess and the weather forecast, he was soon to be the happy owner of a Walmart gift card. His victory was not to be, however, since our owner’s frugal side refused to be denied and convinced him that sneaking out to the little snow pile and heaving coffee cups full of snow onto the lawn was a completely reasonable thing to do. I have watched enough mob movies to know that “snitches get stitches” and because I was the solo witness, my coworkers were never told of the sad, duplicitous end to our snow pile.
13. The new year’s decorating contest
Back in my early career, I was employed in a call center. Call centers are notorious for being a lot like high school but with more drama, and this one was no different. You had to bid on shifts regularly, with your rank based on performance, and over time things had coalesced so that I was on a stable team with other oddballs — a handful of lifers and people who were using the relatively high wages to support them through school. We all came in, kept our heads down, and avoided the drama as much as possible.
Part of the environment was regular decorating contests, which my group always ignored. We were all top performers so the consequences were minimal, but upper management clearly thought we had a bad attitude. So when they announced that the COO would be flying in to tour the site in December 2012, our manager was told that we HAD to participate in the New Year’s decorating contest. She announced this to the team and said she didn’t care design we chose, as long as we did a minimum decorating level. In the silence that followed, one of the students spoke up to clarify that she did indeed mean “any design,: and she confirmed that she did not care.
For those of you have forgotten, in late 2012 there was a whole weird New Age apocalypse thing going around, based on the supposed end of the Mayan calendar. The proposed design was “New Year apocalypse” and my team was suddenly very enthusiastic about decorating. We built a huge 3D Mayan pyramid that we put over our manager’s cubicle, with smaller ones on every desk. We were fortunate enough to have a large plate glass window in our area, and we painted a large comet coming in for impact. We discussed wearing tin foil hats, but decided they didn’t work with the headsets, so instead we put them on top of our monitors. We made a large banner proclaiming, “Welcome to the New Year… hope you survive the experience!” which we put up just before the COO got to the floor.
I have fond memories of our site manager explaining that we were the top performing team in the site to the COO while glaring at us. Our manager remained serene throughout, and when the votes for the contest were counted we came in second. Interestingly enough, there were very specific guidelines for all further decorating contests while I was there, and no one said another word when my team continued to ignore them
