I've Been Had

How do you feel about Amway salesmen? You love them, don't you? They're so adorable! You just want to scoop them up in your arms and kiss their darling little noseys, don't you?

Oh wait, that's kittens.

Last week I got an email invitation from a high-level manager in our division. I was on a list of about 15 people, including our section director, most of whom I know to some degree, several of whom I don't. The invitation title was "Celebrate Success!" and the body read, "Please join us at this event so we can discuss how to keep this great momentum going." The location was given as "Offsite - North" and the time was 11am-1pm today.

I emailed the first guy on the distribution list - a charter member of our three-martini break set - and asked him if he had any idea what the hell it was about. He didn't, though he did make an ominous reference to Soylent Green. Nobody else I asked knew either. All were mystified.

Eventually the information worked its way around the department rumor mill that we were going to Dave & Buster's as some sort of a teambuilding thing, and we'd carpool (D&B's in BFE - can I get a chant going here?). Whatever. Free lunch, right? (Hopefully not consisting of us.) So I accepted.

Everyone else arrived before the manager who set up the invitation, was seated, and our food and drink orders taken; then the manager arrived with some other dude in tow. Said other dude turned out to be a financial consultant from Ameriprise; and the deal was that he was paying for our lunch and game tokens in exchange for us filling out a little personal information at the top of a form so he could contact us at a later date to discuss our finances.

*Sputter*

*Sputter*

Well, gosh. I'd just hate to waste the poor fellow's time on turnip blood, so I put in a disused email address and my old Corpus cell phone number. Mr. Soylent Green took it a step further and just made shit up.

The senior manager said our group had been hand-picked because we've all done such good work, and that the lunch and activities at D&B were a reward for our performance; but as my supervisor had been completely unaware of the event before today, that seems rather unlikely. My cube neighbor (who was not part of the group) thinks I should notify HR.

At least I got to demonstrate my dazzling suckiness at skeeball and pocket billiards to coworkers who were previously unaware of these traits; and isn't that what teambuilding is all about?

As it turns out, Soylent Green tastes just like chicken.