Team Work at a Work Shop
When I was working for a big multinational fruit company, one of the things that was most apparent was that one of the most important jobs Human Resources could find was hiring people to impart seminars. Seminars on everything, and God all of them involved the dynamics parts, games played to make a point but in fact only made the participants look ridiculous. As you can see I was not a great cheerleader for seminars they took up a lot of time, the only good thing about them was that there was usually a good lunch involved.
For me the terrible part was it was usually held on a day when I had to send a report to some US port and as usual they wanted it ASAP. I usually had it before ten a.m., but with the seminar I only started working on it until around one. And boy those women could push, every fifteen minutes they would call demanding the report and threatening to call the general manager. I actually did not care that much because I had a great defense, I had told my boss not to send me to that seminar. Luckily I am an autist, the smart kind, so I could do my job in a quarter of the time a normal person could, so I usually did send the report before it was too late.
But the thing is about the seminars, one Saturday I was working and my boss called me and said to come to the conference room. A woman friend of his, who had gone to college with him was there and she was giving a talk about one of the things seminars are about, you know team work, loyalty, learn to live on what you earn or something like that. She was working on her presentation, was not charging , only talked for about 45 minutes and I found it cool. About two years later, I was on vacation but Human Resources called me and said I had to go to a seminar at a conference venue at a local University, which was about very important topics. It was given by an Argentinian lady who worked at a private University in San Pedro and was charging a lot for it. It took all day for her to finish and it was exactly what the lady whom I told you about talked about for 45 minutes. But since this was a professional it took her 8 hours to say the same crap.
Then one day the whole office building, maybe 120 employees had to go to a hotel to a seminary presented by a Salvadoran, who as an introduction told us that at one point in his life he was out of work, was at a beach somewhere in El Salvador reading a self help book, when he had an epiphany and figured he could make a living conning people with seminaries. OK, not in those words but that is what I got out of it. The work shop was about team work, yes, the word is work shop not seminary. Well for the dynamics part we were divided into groups and each group sent a representative to the center where they would all agree on a number and come back, the whole group would agree the number was right and we would write it on a paper and send it to the guy.
Now the first thing this guy said was, this is a game but the name of the game is to win, so keep that in mind. So, I, who am very smart told the leader let's just put a higher number and win this thing, he said that would not be fair, I told him life is not fair. So we did that the four times we were sent to the center. One other team tried to do the same but I came up with a huge number and still beat them. Well of course we won, but that guy told us, So you won, but how do you feel, you are a failed group you forgot about the teamwork. So I told him, well that is your fault, you said the important thing is to win, so yes I feel mighty good about it. That really pissed him off, but he wasn't going to hit me so I didn't care.
Of course that win was soon a loss because we got back to the office real late and those women really chewed me up demanding their report.