TEAMBUILDING TRAINING AND FUNERALS

We were in a traffic jam. You know the kind where, when it ends, there was no real reason why it should have been. There was no construction, cops or a wreck to tie us up. To destructively pass the time, we complained about the boss and the petty pointless bickering at work as we slowly drove to our teambuilding training.

Teambuilding is a way of overcoming the hostility between co-workers by building a winning team with balls, Styrofoam cups and games. At least, that’s the way it was taught.

The first game was to throw a ball all over the room to people, who then had to stand and say what they hoped to get out of the training. When my good buddy Lance tossed me the ball I baldly declared “The heck with team building, I want more hair!”

Next we were given a Styrofoam cup to invent different things to do with it. I thought of using it for drug tests or, after biting the bottom off, it would make an excellent mini megaphone. But by my turn these two were taken, so I had to feebly come up with a Styrofoam cup eating contest.

We were told that Douglas McGregor in 1960 first devised a teambuilding concept and presented it to General Motors, who turned it down. He then went to Japan where it was accepted and changed their bust economy to boom. So that today Ford and GM are facing bankruptcy, while Americans are buying new Toyotas.

The big American teambuilding success story presented was the Harley Davidson motorcycle company. Harleys initially were known for breaking down often, so their uneasy riders carried wrenches to fix them. In fact, the Harley wave to fellow riders was elbow bent with hand up high, like they were holding a wrench.

Harley’s new owners took a teambuilding approach. When a problem popped up on the assembly line, they shut it down to solve it in brain storming sessions, so they weren’t all revved up with no place to go. This was unheard of at the time, because traditionally an assembly line was never shut down arbitrarily in America. But the quality went up and the wrenches went away.

Finally, we had to tell an inspiring story about some team we’d been on once. I talked about the Sneaker Squeakers, our old last place in D league intramural college basketball team.

We couldn’t dribble, shoot or score and only won one game by forfeit. In fact, one teammate’s sole goal was to foul out, but he couldn’t keep up and was always in the wrong court where the ball wasn’t. But we were so bad and funny that eventually we gained a following, which included girls. So we considered our team a success with the qualities of incompetence and fun.

The day after the training I took the morning off at work to go to Harry’s funeral, my best friend’s father. When I saw Harry lying there in his bright red plaid shirt looking like a large wax dummy I started to sob like some brokenhearted cheerleader. Everyone turned to look at me, since I was the only one crying. I’m a wreck at funerals.

The presiding preacher pumped the family for stories about Harry to tell, as he hadn’t known him. Then he gave a sermon about how if you go to church you’d go to heaven. I never knew of Harry going to church, but the minister assured us he was in a better place. Harry was a WWII vet and got a 21 gun salute send off, then disappeared from the face of the earth forever.
A funeral is the pause that depresses and makes puny are weekly worries. As we rush to our own funerals some day, the years fly by and the days blur like eye drops. I returned to work where a wrong look or word could create life long enemies, where hissy fits exploded like sneezes in the cold and flu season and where scheme building flourished. Back to the battlefield- INCOMING!

Rest in peace. See ya later, Harry.