let’s discuss workplace contests gone awry

by Alison Green on September 5, 2024

Workplace contests sometimes go off the rails in ways no ever intended. (Luckily for us!)

Some examples that have been shared here in the past:

•. “We had a hot sauce eating contest at work years ago that ended with the crowd demanding that the contestants stop before they got hurt (and passing the hat to come up with a second prize) and then one contestant threw up in the bushes on the way to his bus and the other was up all night and didn’t come in to work the next day.”

•. “Our work has a terrible ‘who can walk the most steps’ contest. It’s framed as a fitness thing, but it’s pretty ableist and frankly comes off not great when all of us are working from our homes, are pressured to work more hours, and a lot of folks (particularly at more junior levels) find it hard to find the time for regular exercise. So, sorry not sorry, I attached my activity tracker to my siberian husky’s collar and am KILLING it. I’ve made my views known and no one listened, so if the doggo wins the prize will go straight to the furloughed employees assistance fund.”

•. “My dad’s workplace hosts an annual chili cookoff and everyone would bring in a crockpot of their chili, put it in the kitchen, and then judging and mass chili consumption would happen at lunch. One year, one of his coworkers brought in an empty crockpot in the morning, took a bowl of chili from every other crockpot and dumped it in his crockpot while people were working, stirred it up and called it his own chili. He ended up WINNING that year for his ‘depth of flavor,’ and confessed after he got asked for the recipe and had no answer. Everyone wanted to riot!”

Let’s talk more about workplace contests gone terribly wrong. Please share your stories in the comment section.

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    1. Clearance Issues*

      idk but I know someone who did the steps contest with their apple watch on their toddler who one once.

      2. 1-800-BrownCow*

        My dad’s company did a step contest back in the 90s, so before fitness watches. They used those step counters you clip to your waistband or belt that basically counted steps based on vibrations from when you walked. My dad realized one evening after he finished mowing our 3ish acres of yard with the riding mower that the vibration of the mower caused the step counter to register it as steps. He did go for walks every day anyway, but would always end up with an extra high count the weeks he mowed the lawn.

        1. Learn ALL the things*

          My Apple Watch thinks that crocheting is me taking steps, so I get a WHOLE lot of steps if I pick up my crochet project in the evening.

          1. HailRobonia*

            “Wow, Learn All the things, you really got a lot of steps in!”

            “Yeah, I’m really hooked on this contest!”

          2. Pibble*

            I had to switch to an ankle band for my fitbit if I wanted any hope of an accurate step count when knitting! (Bonus: now it actually credits me my steps when pushing a grocery cart in the store, carrying something heavy that keeps my arm from moving, etc.)

        2. DannyG*

          On a cruise recently I went up before dawn to walk the exercise course on the upper deck. Measured 1/8 mile. After 1st lap I went to check my time splits and I found that I had completed almost 2 miles. The Apple Watch was using GPS to track distance, so I was getting the ship’s motion as well as my walking counted. Switched to “indoor walk” settings and it worked fine.

          1. Elitist Semicolon*

            My running partner once forgot to turn off her Garmin watch after a run and, when she got home, it told her she’d run something like 27 miles at an average pace of 20 mph.

          2. Isabel Archer*

            That’s amazing, especially if you view it as a cautionary tale about how often we assume our tech is “right.”

        3. Freya*

          A dance event I was at 15-ish years ago did something similar – presumably the person who danced the most would get the most steps. That weekend, we discovered that slapping someone on the butt would register as a step on the cheap little pedometers we were given for contest purposes…

          2. linger*

            I think we need to know:
            Did it count as a step for the slapper or the slappee?
            Exactly how was this discovered?
            How was it utilised once discovered?

    2. Salesforce Administrator*

      I won the steps contest by knitting. Turns out, if you knit with the yarn in your left hand and wear the watch on your left hand, it counts steps like nobody’s business!

      I also do that to jack up my step count for my health insurance

      1. kicking-k*

        This is why, when I got a FitBit a few years ago, I got a pendant – I want to know whether those are steps or knitting, please! (And I’ve got no health insurance to contend with as I’m in the UK.)

      2. WillowSunstar*

        Yeah, Fitbit also used to do that for me while crocheting. I’ve switched to a Garmin since Google is effectively killing off the Fitbit. But now I do exercise for me, since am also WFH and need to lose weight. It’s hard, I have to make myself exercise on breaks and in the evening after work.

        2. She of Many Hats*

          Hubby & I both have Fitbit/Google smartwatches. We would hike together with him using walking sticks. He would end up with 1500-2000 more steps than I did despite us having similar stride lengths. I think using the sticks changed his movement enough to register as more steps.

        3. allathian*

          Put the watch on the wrist of your dominant hand when you knit or crochet, especially if you use the English technique of passing the thread over the needles/hook. If you do it the Finnish way, basically only your fingers are moving.

      3. Beka Cooper*

        Yes! I frequently get the little notification that I’ve closed my “movement” ring on my Apple Watch while I’m sitting on my couch listening to an audiobook, knitting away.

      4. SpaceySteph*

        My Fitbit thinks I swim laps for half an hour every Friday night. What do I actually do? Fold laundry in front of the TV. (I have 3 kids so its a lot of small clothes to fold)

        I’ve never used it to win a contest though…

        1. Hornswoggler*

          A friend of mine got congratulated by his fitness device for swimming for 90 minutes one evening. He’s an orchestral conductor.

          1. Thunderingly*

            My watch thinks I’m on an elliptical when I conduct… maybe because I wear it on my right hand (my baton hand).

            2. But wait, there's more!*

              I wonder if someone (who would need to be both far more scientific and far more musical than I) could come up with a way of determining which music you’re conducting based on the motion that a fitness tracker thinks you’re doing. Swimming? Bach. Elliptical? Probably Rachmaninoff. Aggressive Push-ups? Definitely Sousa.

      5. Silly step counters*

        Playing mahjong does the same thing. My wrist told me I reached my daily step goal while I was sitting and playing mahjong with my grandparents.

      6. Ace in the Hole*

        I’m trying to visualize this, and kind of baffled. I knit with the yarn in my left hand (“picking” style) and my yarn-holding hand stays almost completely still the whole time.

        I thought moving the yarn hand was something only english-style knitters did… am I missing out on a whole different way to knit?

        1. Penny Parker*

          My grandma was an amazing knitter, including selling her finished products. She taught me to knit by moving both hands; it is faster.

      3. 1 Non Blonde*

        I had the absolute laziest husky, who wanted nothing more than to be as close to me as possible, which would preclude any exercise attempts (throwing the ball, etc) because she wouldn’t want to leave my side. She was also half-Lab, so maybe that was part of it? (not a dog encyclopedia here)

          1. It’s A Butternut Squash*

            I was very concerned lol. Because really how do you put one on tour hamster? Is it like a belt? Does it register the Trent tiny steps?

      1. RC*

        I feel like Judi Love had a different experience with her remote controlled rat, but it’s possible it counts when it nudges a wall?

        (Do yourselves a favor and look up “ Taskmaster record the highest number on this pedometer” on youtube lol)

        1. Hannah*

          Maybe it’s just the size of the vibrations? Because no, it rarely hits a wall and it racked up like 1000 steps in the 20 minutes it needed to cover my kitchen.

          1. Zephy*

            Let me preface this by saying that workplace stepping contests are terribad for all the reasons already listed, but: 20 minutes of actual walking would get most people about double that many steps, maybe close to triple if you’ve got a shorter stride like I do. Just sayin’.

        2. Tree*

          Bridget Christie’s stepping technique made me laugh so hard that I’m sure it counted as a hardcore ab workout!

          1. RC*

            That might be one of favorite tasks in an already great season, from Ardal apparently needing it to be shoe themed to Sophie looking cool and powerful to the remote controlled rat and then just everything Bridget.

          2. Tiny clay insects*

            Oh my God and then in a later episode when she’s dancing (I believe it’s the “House Queens” music video) and her dancing looks just like her weird pedometer walk!

      2. Don’t make me come over there*

        I found that accidentally leaving it in your jeans pocket on laundry day only gets you about 90 steps (washer only, I caught it before it went in the dryer).

        1. Just Another Cog in the Machine*

          I washed my old fitbit twice. Once, it didn’t seem to register anything weird. But the second, it gave me a lot of steps. So, it might depend.

          1. Pennyworth*

            A friend lost her fitbit in her cow paddock. A year later she found it under a cow cake, still working.

    7. Name (Required)*

      I know someone me that used their beagle to reduce their health insurance costs by hitting step milestones 30 days in a row.

      1. Orv*

        I knew someone who did the same, but by attaching it to a tether and just whirling it in a circle. To be fair to her, she’d had foot surgery and couldn’t walk, but her insurer refused to make an exception. If she’d missed the step goal she would have been kicked off her plan entirely.

        6. goddessoftransitory*

          I am thrilled she came up with a solution and enraged that she had to. They were clearly planning to boot her off since they would know she couldn’t walk!

        7. Crencestre*

          Is that even legal?! Seems to me that a smart lawyer would have a field day with that one!

          To all you lawyers reading AAM, please weigh in: Is it legal or not for an insurance company to set its customers a goal for taking a minimum number of daily steps and then threaten to kick anyone off their plan if they missed doing the daily minimum even if their medical conditions made it impossible or unsafe for them to do so?

          1. Orv*

            This was pre-ACA, so it may not be legal now. At the time, they decided her BMI was too high and said that if she didn’t do a certain number of steps a day, they’d assign her to a high-risk plan that covered almost nothing.

        1. Katie*

          some insurance plans offer a discount if you do certain “healthy activities” such as weight loss or hitting a certain step goal every day, or whatever.

    8. Velawciraptor*

      That story reminded me of the story line from The League where the guys had a bet and Ruxin figured out his tracker would count steps if he did….other things….with the arm he wore the tracker on.

      1. Sir Nose d'Voidoffunk*

        I’m glad I ctrl-F’d “League” before I posted and saw you had beaten me to it. So I’ll just say that casting Jeff Goldblum as Ruxin’s dad was absolutely perfect.

      2. Zinnia*

        Can confirm this irl. Belovedest once discussed “private time” with the watch on his wrist something counting that as a vigorous running session.

    9. Fly on the Wall*

      A friend was required to wear a pedometer for his work and it affected his insurance costs. He would put it on his toddler grandson!

    10. Inkognyto*

      When this started with a company I worked at in 2005ish, someone got caught tossing their tracker wrapped in a wet towel in the dryer.
      Turns out when you run over a marathon each day, it got suspicious.
      They called him on it, he admitted it and it all got outed on the company internal website that they are ‘watching’. Turns out when you offer something like 25% off health insurance costs next year for the winner people do what it takes.

      1. Global Cat Herder*

        The “discount on health insurance for Fitbit steps” was tried at our company one year. The “winner” was the guy who superglued it to the tire rim of his car so he got exercise credit as he commuted two hours each way in the Bay Area. The “loser” was the lady who was trying to go on disability because of a back injury but was denied because she was still logging over 30k steps a day in the stupid contest – she’d forgotten she’d glued it to her dog’s collar.

    12. Nesprin*

      I had a coworker who won a steps contest because she averaged her steps with her 2yr old husky.

      She claimed some days she walked more, and some days the dog walked more. I do not believe her.

    13. Chauncy Gardener*

      During the pandemic, my stupid company did a step challenge. Since I was working 14 hour days, I would shake my phone as I sat at my computer for hours….

    15. Sarah*

      I went to a Green Day concert recently, and my Fitbit registered over 2,000 steps from me just standing at my seat bouncing around to the music.

      Ended up with over 12,000 steps registered that day, which is very unusual for me on a work from home day.

      Maybe I just need to go to more concerts!

    16. Donkey Hotey*

      Related: our company had a steps challenge earlier this year. They mandated that everyone sign up for a particular activity app on their phones. I had to point out that three different people were walking the equivalent of a full marathon every day, seven days a week, for three weeks, before the judges would acknowledge that those people might be gaming the system.

  2. soontoberetired*

    One division in my company used to have a chili cook off. Won by one of the directors every year. He was the highest ranking entrant and this was not a blind taste test. Of course he won. I tried his chili. It was just average.

    1. sheworkshardforthemoney*

      It reminds me of an Old Workplace where every Christmas the manager and assistant manager “won” the high value gifts in the office raffle. Just a coincidence.

    2. Chirpy*

      The one time I entered a chili contest, I tied for last place with the only other coworker who had also made a more creative type of chili. The others, including the winner, were average, not spicy, watery stuff – think, like, nothing but ground beef, canned diced tomatoes, a can of kidney beans, and maybe one tablespoon of chili powder. They all tasted almost exactly the same.

      My coworker and I decided everyone else just had terrible taste in chili.

  3. Bookworm*

    Years ago, the company I was at had a desk decorating contest for Halloween. One guy brought in a big light up ghost and pumpkin that he had used for lawn decorations for years. They were probably 3ft/1m tall. They were on his desk for a week. I still have photos from when we turned off the lights to get a good photo of them lit up!

    Someone else decided they were going to construct a haunted house out of cardboard around their desk. Manager shut that down when she saw how obstructive it was going to be, plus it was a fire hazard. That person was also spending way too much time on it.

    1. Cellbell*

      In my early career days, we had a similar contest at my job. My cubicle neighbor and I were set apart from the rest of the team a bit and decided to make our area into a haunted cave. We cut up those heavy duty black garbage bags, hung them over our cubes, and added a bunch of spooky decor. After working in there for a few hours, we became a little light headed from the plastic fumes and lack of fresh air, and our manager, who was well over six feet tall, became annoyed at having to stoop to enter our cave whenever she needed something from us. The cave came down and we re-entered the fluorescents, blinking like mole people.

    2. Brain the Brian*

      We had a long-running inter-departmental Halloween decorating contest that got so out of hand in the years preceding the pandemic that HR had to pre-emptively put a stop to it in 2019 (and it hasn’t returned since we went back to the office post-pandemic). The fake gravestones and skeletons were becoming large and numerous enough to be trip hazards, and I seem to recall people had taken to stretching fake spider webs from the sprinklers (I’m still not sure how they managed not to set off the fire alarm system when hanging the stuff). The “prize” every year was just bragging rights — nothing even worth all this effort! I wish I could remember more of the details, but it’s been nearly six years (how is that possible?!) since the last instance…

    3. Anon Again... Naturally*

      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’ 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 comment 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.

      2. The Prettiest Curse*

        First, this sounds hilarious and good for your manager. Second, I know you meant “comet”, but I’m visualising a massive printout of a random AAM comment!

      3. run mad; don't faint*

        I love it. And I am very impressed your team managed to make itself exempt from all other decorating contests simply by following the rules.

          1. Anon Again... Naturally*

            We lost to the team who made giant paper mache fireworks and a huge 2013 disco ball.

      5. Gumby*

        This is probably more a comment on the types of places I have worked, but this just sounds creative and kind of cool to me. It would have been appropriate at 3 of the 4 places I have worked.

      6. BrandNewBandName*

        I am dying (laughing), and I am going to blame you and the Mayan calendar new year debacle, so congrats on second place and making those Mayan calendar beliefs come true with at least one death.
        What did you construct the giant pyramid of? Y’all don’t mess around!

    5. Bitte Meddler*

      I worked in an inside sales environment ages ago. We had a winter-holiday themed decorating contest with each team decorating the entrance to their little cubicle farm.

      My team was overworked and underpaid and we were just not feeling it. The decorating was of the not-mandatory-but-truthfully-mandatory kind.

      So we bought a cheap, inflatable kiddie pool at the dollar store, poured some water in it an added two charcoal briquettes, a carrot, and a couple of twigs.

      Ta-da! Our decoration was Frosty the Snowman but, ya know, if you’d brought him inside an office.

      We didn’t win — other areas looked like they were parts of elaborate movie / stage sets — but we did get chastised by HR for not being team players, so there’s that.

      1. Anon Again... Naturally*

        The idea that adults not wanting to participate in making ridiculous decorations means you’re not a team player has always been so weird to me. Or who don’t want to go out and buy a shirt for Local Sports Team that they don’t even follow so that they can wear it for a ‘spirit’ day. I was so glad when I moved on from call centers.

      2. RussianInTexas*

        We had a stupid floor decorating contest, floor picks the theme. Somehow out floor ended up as “rock concert” or something dumb like that. Everyone had to participate. I just took out some inserts from my CDs and taped them to the cubicle walls.

      3. allathian*

        The one great advantage of a clean desk hotdesking environment is that there’s absolutely no expectation of any decorations at any time. In fact, they’re more or less banned, or at any rate pointless because you have to remove all the decorations before you leave for the day.

        I mean, I get being accused of not being a team player if you refuse to do your job, or only do it reluctantly following a reminder or two, or if you only do the fun parts of the job and leave the drudgery to others… Being voluntold to decorate my office? And being forced to spend my hard-earned pay on it? No thanks! I can participate in things like that only if it doesn’t take too much time to fix and if I can expense any stuff I have to buy for it (unlikely in a goverment job).

    6. Firefighter (Metaphorical)*

      Not a contest gone wrong but this reminds me of the ABSOLUTE LEGEND who won the Xmas office decorating party with a sign on his office door saying:

      Holiday Spirit Meter

      If you are not filled with holiday spirit, when you open the door you will see what appears to be a bleak, ordinary office
      If your heart is full of festive vibes, you will see a wonderland of light and colour

  4. theothermadeline*

    The chili contest one reminded me of a fun day I had years ago when I was working at a keyboard festival in Kalamazoo, MI. The entire downtown business district had a chili cook off (if I’m remembering correctly) and in our office we decided that all the chilis should be themed off of composers. The only two I remember were my favorites – John Philip Sousa inspired a chili loaded down with all the fixins you could imagine and was topped with American Flags. Philip Glass was a bean on a paper plate.

    2. Harper the Other One*

      OMG sending this story to my Glass-loving husband! There needed to be an extra prize for creativity.

        1. Silver Robin*

          Honestly, with Halloween coming up, that made me imagine somebody not going to a Halloween party and then claiming they did go, as the personification of John Cage’s music.

      2. WOOLFAN*

        Haha yes! I can already envision how the Cage entry would go. Empty pot, empty bowls, and a sign instructing you to sit for several minutes while perceiving the scent of the other chili contest entries all around you.

        I feel like for the Glass chili I’d take a bunch of dried beans and create a crop art piece, but in a simple tesselated pattern.

          1. goddessoftransitory*

            Pointilist chili–each bowl has one dab of chili or toppings, arranged across a field and if you stand six miles away on top of the water tower, it’s “An Afternoon at Le Grand Jatte.”

    4. Emotional support capybara (he/him)*

      The P.D.Q. Bach chili is topped with marshmallow fluff and goldfish crackers and is served in a waffle cone.

      3. Ally McBeal*

        “You put the Peeps in the chili pot and eat them both up / You put the Peeps in the chili pot and add the M&Ms / You put the Peeps in the chili pot and it makes it… taste… bad.”

        2. Shellfish Constable*

          Aw man, I wish we had a like button on here.

          I’m teaching ethics again this semester and every term I feel like I understand Chidi more and more.

      4. But Of Course*

        You also get one of those party horns. As you reach the two-thirds mark of your bowl, after eating all the fluff and crackers, alternate blowing the horn with each bite.

      6. I edit everything*

        Has anyone here heard of the Hoffnung Music Festival? My parents had a record of the music when I was a kid. Kinda wish I’d kept it now. Anyway, it happened in the 1950s, and was composers of the day basically spoofing real classical music. It featured things like using vacuum cleaners as instruments and various aural pranks. I’m quite certain PDQ Bach was inspired by it. Now that chili would be wild!
        Worth checking out at least the wikipedia article about it.

    5. Our Business Is Rejoicing*

      Another fan of the Glass chili idea. And now just sitting around thinking of what various composers’ chilis would be like.

      I’ll stop now and not hijack this thread.

      1. WOOLFAN*

        There is a great joke somewhere in here about Mahler chili and horns blowing, but I am working on too few hours of sleep to perfect it.

        1. SunriseRuby*

          There’s an equally good joke out there about Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture and the cannon blasts at the end (no pun intended…for now), but I’m not smart enough to put it together.

              1. Sharpie*

                I was going to ask, what’s an English bean when it’s at home?! A French bean is one wearing a striped top and a beret, au naturelment!

        4. Pipe Organ Guy*

          Eight horns, with the direction, “Schalltrichter auf!” (bells up!). Even clarinets with their bells up, and the organ “Volles Werk” (tutti).

          1. Oddmeister...makin' copies*

            Wouldn’t the Zimmer chili taste a lot like the pot comprised of all his associates’ contributions?

        2. nonee*

          Excuse me, but I think the John Williams chili might exactly resemble this Holst chili?? Maybe he copied the recipe?

      4. maude_lebowski*

        I thought about this all day yesterday and finally came up with one: J.S. Bach chili, made with organ meats.

    9. Quercus*

      I’m assuming it’s an autocorrect thing, but there’s a tiny part of me that wonders whether/hopes that Michigan really has keyboard festivals (computer or music, either one would be fun)

      1. Librarian of Things*

        “KeyboardFest is an annual piano festival which is sponsored by the Mid-Michigan Music Teachers Association. This concert is designed to develop ensemble skills for the more than 250 participating piano students. As many as twenty-four students will be on stage performing duets at the same time, under the direction of their conductor, Jim Hohmeyer.”

        Kalamazoo also has the Gilmore Piano Festival and Albion College has a piano festival, too. I guess this is a Thing in Michigan.

        I’ll reply with the links, but you can get there with Google, too.

          1. theothermadeline*

            I worked at the Gilmore! I don’t know if they’ve changed their name to piano festival, when I was there it was the Irving S. Gilmore International Keyboard Festival, and included programming with all keyboard instruments including organs, accordians, etc.

            1. Librarian of Things*

              Their website says it’s the Irving S. Gilmore International Piano Festival. Their vision, mission, etc., only mention pianos now. They present the “highest levels of pianism,” which I had no idea was a word before today.

      2. A Library Person*

        The event in Kalamazoo is probably the Gilmore Piano Festival. (I suppose it’s possible the original commenter was referring to a different event, but this seemed most likely to me as a Michigander.) And yes, there really is a Kalamazoo.

            1. theothermadeline*

              If y’all are familiar with it, that was the year we had keyboard designs installed in a few crosswalks. We had a big conversation in the marketing department about how we could promote them without encouraging people to try to dance like Tom Hanks in Big in the middle of traffic

        3. SurlyAF*

          Jumping in to second that Kalamazoo exists, though locals refer to it as Kzoo. And sadly there isn’t a zoo in Kzoo.

    10. Orv*

      John Williams chili — it’s good in its own right, but mostly it reminds you of all the fun things you watched while you were eating chili.

    13. NMitford*

      Fun Fact: John Philip Sousa apparently loved to make spaghetti sauce for his family. I once went to a contest at Historic Congressional Cemetery, where he’s buried, for the best spaghetti sauce that was judged by his descendent John Philip Sousa IV.

  5. ChurchOfDietCoke*

    Not really an all-company contest but my OldJob had a cricket club, and every year they would play a one-day match against another big local organisation. It was supposed to be ‘Proper Serious English Cricket Match, Jolly-ho!’ but it ALWAYS ended with all of the players and the umpire being way, way too pissed (in the British English sense of ‘drunk’) to see the ball by mid-afternoon. I think they actually enjoyed it most when the weather was bad and they could just sack it off and go straight to the pub.

    2. Orv*

      This reminds me of the Midwestern passtime of “deer drinking,” which is when you’re ostensibly deer hunting with your buddies, but you never actually end up shooting anything because the the fun part is hanging out and drinking.

          1. Susie Occasionally(formerly No)-Fun*

            I watch this movie every November 15. (My dad was a Yooper and I miss hearing the accent.)

          1. The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon*

            Two friends once tried to teach me to play euchre. It devolved into an argument between them over the rules and I eventually quietly left without their noticing. I have since been told that this is the Most Authentic Euchre Experience.

            1. Orv*

              I learned it in college and enjoyed it, but I haven’t played it in years because I moved out of the Midwest.

      2. Decima Dewey*

        See “The Second Week of Deer Camp” by Da Yoopers. Where a character named Boopus killed a deer with his truck. “Boopus got the first deer since 1968!”

      3. Reluctant Mezzo*

        A friend of my husband’s and his buddy went ‘deer hunting’ to a town really close to the border of Nevada and known for some of its fine legal social services.

        The wife said nothing till one of the guys got home, and then mentioned, ‘maybe you should have taken your guns with you?’

    3. GoryDetails*

      Reminds me of the client-led cricket match in Sayers’ “Murder Must Advertise”; Lord Peter, a champion cricketer from his college days, is working at the advertising agency undercover (as his own ne’er-do-well cousin), and plans to play a very low-key game so as not to blow his cover. But at some point the opposition’s bowler hits him on the elbow and he forgets all about that, squaring up and [insert suitable cricketing terms for completely smashing the opposition], to the delight of the true cricket fans and the utter bafflement of everybody else.

      The whole match involved lots of workplace rivalries and prejudices and “he’s only ahead of me in the batting order because our manager hates me” bits. Great fun!

      2. Kes*

        lol I just read this. The book has some ridiculous parts (he’s going undercover.. using his middle names, which are listed in Who’s Who) but I really enjoyed the workplace portrayal of the british 19whatever advertising agency

        1. WhoAmIOhYeahThatsIt*

          I mean, if I had been in his position, I couldn’t have resisted going by “Death” either.

            1. Hornswoggler*

              I always thought it was pronounced Dee Ath. (You do sometimes see the name DeAth written with a capital A.)

              1. GoryDetails*

                The pronunciation comes up in-story, when he’s asked by his new co-workers if he has a first name:

                “It’s spelt Death. Pronounce it any way you like. Most of the people who are plagued with it make it rhyme with teeth, but personally I think it sounds more picturesque when rhymed with breath.”

        2. Daubenton*

          Never mind the cricket match, The Great Nutrax Row could provide any number of AAM letters, depending on which of the participants wrote in!

          1. Eastendbird*

            My very first comment after years of lurking, to say thank you all for the Murder Must Advertise comments. And yes – the Nutrax row would provide any number of amazing letters!

        3. Ama*

          It’s based on Sayers’ own experience working in an ad agency before her novels were published (and she also wrote it in a few months because The Nine Tailors was taking her longer than expected and she had to get something to her publisher), which in my opinion is why the workplace stuff is really good but the mystery is not her strongest.

    6. I edit everything*

      Fun Fact: The Calm app includes “rules of cricket” as one of their sleep stories designed to put people to sleep.

  6. Chairman of the Bored*

    One year an employer partnered with a local food bank for a competitive food drive, where the department who donated the most food won.

    They opted to determine “most” by simply weighing the bulk donations from each group.

    The Engineering team (of course) went to the grocery store with a scale and determined that cans of broth had the highest mass/cost ratio of all the non-perishable food; because broth is cheap and they would also get credit for the weight of the heavy steel cans.

    They then just purchased like $300 worth of canned broth with department funds, turned that in as their donation, and easily won the competition.

    When the rep from the food bank was awarding their victory certificate they actually said “you guys completely missed the point”.

    This is one of my go-to examples for how people need to make sure to set metrics that reflect the outcome they actually want, *especially* when dealing with engineers.

    1. Medium Sized Manager*

      That feels like an example of people being deliberately obtuse and avoiding using critical thinking, not having solid metrics. It’s pretty obvious that the goal of a food bank donation is to..donate food to people who are in need.

      1. Expelliarmus*

        That’s true, but if you make it into a competition, someone’s inevitably bound to prioritize that over the real purpose.

      2. Llama Identity Thief*

        It’s a competition. To a lot of people, that immediately means the goal is to win, no matter what the underlying reason for the competition is.

        1. NotBatman*

          I was thinking that! I used to volunteer at a soup kitchen, and ingredients > mixed foods. 50 gallons of broth would be 100x more useful than 50 gallons of soup, and bulk foods are infinitely superior to single-servings. So if I was in charge, I’d give the engineering department the award for most *useful* donation. Even if they did cheat on the quantity thing.

          1. Ginger Cat Lady*

            For a soup kitchen, sure. But for a food BANK? No. A can of soup is much better for an individual or family than broth. Because the soup can be a meal without other ingredients. Broth, not so much.
            Different setting than your soup kitchen.

            1. Cmdrshprd*

              Idk, maybe a really big can of soup like 32oz can be enough for one person, but I don’t think enough for a family. most soup can sizes barely fill up one person, let alone a family.

              Even in a food pantry setting I think broth is likely more useful for a family to make dinner versus a single standard can of soup, that would maybe fill up one person.

              1. Learn ALL the things*

                A lot of people who rely on food banks don’t just lack money, they lack the time it would take to make a meal from ingredients. A single mom with multiple jobs who just wants to get some nutritious food into her kids may prefer soup that just needs to be heated to broth that needs to have other ingredients added.

                1. metadata minion*

                  People also often lack adequate — or any — cooking facilities. A can of soup you can eat cold. It isn’t exactly *delicious* that way to most people, but it’ll get you fed and it’s safe to eat. To make soup from ingredients you need utensils and at the very least a hot pot or something.

            2. Seeking Second Childhood*

              Broth lets you cook for yourself – whether it’s minestrone or womtom soup or pho or sanchoco.

              1. Freelance Fenelope*

                Yeah, but plenty of people going to food banks don’t have a place to cook, or reliable refrigeration. Which would feed you better, a cold can of soup or a cold can of just chicken broth?

                1. PH*

                  That’s not true. I manage a food pantry and the VAST VAST majority of our clients are people who cook at home for most or all of their meals. Senior citizens and multi generational households. Mostly people from other countries who typically cook and eat their own cultural foods and aren’t particularly interested in American prepared foods as opposed to ingredients. Obviously not every food pantry is like mine but many are.

            3. Insert Clever Name Here*

              Maybe food banks in your area are different than in mine, but “broth” is always on their list of wanted items. In fact, I just pulled up their list of “most needed items” and nothing on it is a meal without any other ingredients:
              – peanut butter
              – lean canned proteins (ex., tuna, salmon, or chicken in water)
              – canned vegetables (low sodium or no salt added)
              – canned fruits
              – tomato products (ex., spaghetti sauce or diced tomatoes)
              – beans
              – whole grain cereal
              – whole grains (ex., pasta, brown rice, quinoa)
              – healthy snacks
              – condiments
              – oils
              – spices

              As commenter “commensally” said below, broth with other random canned ingredients turns into a soup.

        2. goddessoftransitory*

          I was going to say, at least wasn’t okra or hominy on markdown–broth is very usable and in cans, shelf-stable.

          1. AFac*

            I was thinking that something like jicama or a giant pumpkin or gallon-size bottles of white vinegar would have been much, much worse.

      4. Worldwalker*

        To be fair, that’s far from the possible donation. Use the broth to cook rice and you have something really good; add some chicken thighs and it’s both tasty and cheap.

      5. Learn ALL the things*

        I used to work at a library and we did a food for fines event every year where people could bring in donations for the food bank and we’d waive a certain amount of their library fines to thank them for their donation. I think it was a dollar per item. Every year we had at least one person call and complain that it cost them a dollar per item to buy food to donate so they weren’t saving any money. Our marketing person had to explain that the point wasn’t for people to spend less on a food donation than they would have paid in fines, the point was for the money they would have spent on fines to be spent in a way that benefited the community.

      6. MigraineMonth*

        If we’re talking at a systems level, purchasing food to donate to food banks is very inefficient to begin with.

        Giving food insecure people money or at least food stamps is the most cost-efficient system for feeding people, since grocery/convenience/big-box stores is already an optimized system most people use. The purpose of food banks is often to reduce food *waste* in a community rather than efficiently feed those who are food insecure. Since they already get a lot of donations of unwanted or near-expiration-date food, the best way to support food banks in their mission is a cash donation, which they can stretch much farther than an single consumer.

        Of course, perfectly optimizing one’s charitable giving is less important than giving. So while I would have organized the contest to raise money rather than food-by-weight, it was still a net gain to the organization in terms of non-perishable food collected, awareness raise, and quite possibly additional monetary contributions. (It’s okay to be “lazy” and just give cash, though!)

        1. MigraineMonth*

          Just to note, I’ve was on food stamps and received bags of food from a food bank during Covid quarantining, and the latter was less than ideal in a number of ways. A lot of the food was, unhealthy, not in alignment with dietary restrictions/needs, culturally unfamiliar so I didn’t know how to prepare it, or spoiled before I could finish eating it.

          (There was also a memorable time when I received a pound of green peppers and only realized once I’d started eating one that they were jalapenos, not immature bell peppers as I’d assumed. I have trouble with medium salsa; what am I supposed to do with a pound of fresh jalapenos??)

        2. Recent grad*

          Also giving money to food banks is almost always more efficient then donating food. Along with a lot of food banks getting bulk pricing, food banks often are getting plenty of donations of food but still need money to pay for things like rent, electricity (giant walk in fridges add up), transportation od donated food and other expenses

    2. Clisby*

      This reminds me of something the late Charlie Munger (Warren Buffett’s longtime partner) said: “Show me an incentive and I’ll show you an outcome.”

      1. Artemesia*

        Like when the IRS promoted based on cases closed. It is easy to go after 100 grandmas who owe $500 each maybe and close those cases. It is hard to go after multimillionaires who hide their income artfully but if you close those it may result in millions in taxes. So competent agents got bypassed by people gaming the system and doing little serious investigative work.

      2. goddessoftransitory*

        It’s true! Once when visiting my sister I offered her kids a chance to win a shiny dime if they put their laundry away first. It was a literal ten cent coin–the epitome of “you can’t even buy gum with this anymore” prize. But it was a PRIZE and by God they tore up those stairs to their bedrooms with their laundry!

    3. Lab Boss*

      It’s a funny story for sure, but it sort of illustrates a more pervasive issue with employers having an outcome in mind, but then setting up a system that incentivizes employees to do something else- and then getting upset when employees follow the incentives that benefit them, instead of pursuing the employer’s theoretical goal.

      1. Hastily Blessed Fritos*

        Yeah, it’s a classic example of Goodhart’s Law (when a metric becomes a target, it ceases to become a good metric”) in action.

        1. Lab Boss*

          Well I’d never heard of that but holy cow I’m stealing it. I’m a bit notorious at work for seeing the perverse incentives (or Goodhart-triggering metrics, I suppose) hiding in the latest great plan; nobody believes me when I say it’s because I play so many board games I’m used to looking for unexpected strategies.

          2. Llama Identity Thief*

            I absolutely believe that it’s because of board games, I’m similar and it’s definitely due to more general game competitiveness.

          3. MigraineMonth*

            Ooh, there’s an amazing article about AIs who were trained to do specific tasks such as play a board game really well or move a ball with a robot arm. Or rather, that was what the researchers meant to train the AI to do. Instead, the AI figured out how to accomplish the objective (a high win-loss ratio by crashing the game every time they were losing, appearing to carry the ball from this video angle even when they weren’t touching it) *by cheating*.

        2. Hroethvitnir*

          That pairs beautifully with my favourite new concept: the purpose of a system is what it does. (There’s a Wikipedia article if anyone is interested.)

          Such a pithy explanation of something that can be hard to elucidate!

      2. Dust Bunny*

        See, to me this edges into the “no assholes” rule. It’s a food bank donation drive: If you’re not an asshole, you shouldn’t need parameters.

        We used to do a food drive but the prize was something minor (dinky plastic trophy and a 12-inch plastic skeleton. I forget why. I guess because medical library). They determined winner by cans per person or something so smaller departments had a chance. My department and another small department alternated winning for several years. A friend of mine in the other department was also crafty so every time we handed off the plastic skeleton she would be dressed in a new outfit. I think people started making sure we won so they could see what she wore next.

        1. Lab Boss*

          Yeah in this case they were gaming a charity system, which is just being a jerk. I meant it in the broader sense- Goodhart’s Law, as I just today learned the concept was called.

        2. Orv*

          Honestly, if the goal is to do the most good, it’s almost always better to donate money instead of food to a food bank. They know how to spend it to get the most bang for the buck. But people have an aversion to giving cash for some reason.

          1. Worldwalker*

            Exactly. Donate cash and the food bank can buy wholesale, possibly with a charity discount. Plus they know what they’re most in need of at the moment, so they can get that.

          2. OaDC*

            This is only sort of true. I volunteer at a food bank, and of course they need money and use it to buy food in bulk as well as keep the lights on. But everyone, patrons and staff, loves it when food drives come in. The patrons enjoy getting different things, it’s food that can be put on the shelves immediately, and if it clears out a donor’s pantry shelf after they realize they don’t like the canned chili they bought in bulk from Costco, added bonus. Food drives are a good thing!

            1. commensally*

              Agreed! I heard that a lot and the more I’m involved in our local food pantry the more obviously it’s wrong. Yes, a food bank can get a lot more calories buying bulk rice, but your smalllocal food pantry likely doesn’t have the logistics setup for trucks full of rice, and that’s often not what they need (and they get a lot of that kind of stuff from retailer and wholesaler overstock anyway.) The stuff they need donated is the stuff like Campbell’s Soup, tea bags, and fruit snacks, that wouldn’t be an efficient use of cash but are a great qol bonus for their clients. (Besides, all the donated cash gets pushed to the cash assistance/eviction prevention fund first.)

              Broth is also always good though. With broth any other random mix of cans can become hearty soup

              1. metadata minion*

                Yeah, from what I can tell the smaller the food back is, the more they’re going to want actual food donations. The big regional food bank in my area really *is* buying and repackaging 100-pound sacks of rice; the little food bank the church down the street runs would much rather have jars of peanut butter and cans of soup.

                1. commensally*

                  In my area there’s actually a distinction between “Food bank” and “Food Pantry”. It’s probably somewhat different other places, but not vastly so. The central food bank gets the huge amounts of bulk stuff (and also lots of grant money,) has the scale, storage, paid staff, and logistics to do that effectively, safely, and with minimal waste. Food pantries are out in the neighborhoods and actually handle most of the distribution to individual clients. If you’re donating to/working with a central food bank, money is definitely a better donation than items (and while many of them do accept donations from food drives, they aren’t really set up well to work at that scale.) At least in my area they often don’t give much food away to individuals – they act on a wholesale level to provide food at need to a variety of smaller organizations that distribute it, including soup kitchens, food pantries, homeless shelters, emergency relief, etc.

                  Food pantries are generally small organizations out in the communities who handle most of the day-to-day distribution. They are almost always nearly all volunteer-run on a shoestring, and very few of them regularly buy food with donated money – money goes to facility upkeep (always a problem), administration overhead, and cash assistance. The food comes from partnerships with local food-related businesses (this is mostly perishable overstock stuff), from the food bank (this is mostly bulk shelf-stable stuff in smaller packaging), and from donations from individuals and community drives (this is a huge variety of other things that mean the clients aren’t living on nothing but bulk rice and slightly brown potatoes.) They often don’t have the facilities or vehicles to keep bulk inventory for more than a couple of weeks at a time even if they had the trained staff to handle it.

              2. Orv*

                Good to know. I used to live in the kind of place where people would donate things like jars of expired marshmallow fluff because it made them feel less guilty than “throwing food away,” and poor people should be happy for whatever they get, right?

        3. Reluctant Mezzo*

          My husband’s school did a food donation contest where one of the prizes was dyeing my husband’s beard pink. One guy won, sprayed pink dye on the mostly white beard, all was well, even when my husband seized the spray and dyed the kid’s hair pink. Or tried to–the boy’s hair was so dark the pink didn’t show up.

          However, my husband was undergoing chemo at the time, so he gamed the kid by pulling out huge chunks of the beard and blaming it on the dye…

          Apparently the kid spent the next several hours washing his hair to get the dye out. Someone told the kid what was going on the next day, and the kid literally saluted my husband for such a sick burn.

        4. I edit everything*

          A bunch of churches where I used to live did a food drive contest, and our church was so determined to win, it took off in a wonderful way. It quickly became an annual event, and they now fill a good sized box truck with everything they collect (we’ve since moved away), and it’s a huge boost for the local food pantry.

    5. Peanut Hamper*

      This is why I always hated those reading contests schools and libraries do when I was teaching. Because it’s about reading for some kids and winning for other kids. I remember one kid who just read every tiny little short book he could get his hands on, just so he could win. But he got nothing out of any of those books.

      1. Iris Eyes*

        Our school has solved that by making the winner of the reading contest the student who raises the most money (??) which hypothetically is tied to the amount of reading they do but in reality is a measurement of how willing your parents are to try to capitalize their social relationships.

        1. Margaret Cavendish*

          >>but in reality is a measurement of how willing your parents are to try to capitalize their social relationships.

          So many school fundraisers operate on this model! And as with everything, there’s a huge equity problem, because not everyone’s parents has this kind of social relationship that they can leverage in the first place.

          1. Quill*

            It’s also almost always cheaper to just have a fee than a fundraiser. Even people whose parents theoretically have time, money, storage space, and social capital for sales for Band Boosters, cub scouts, wrestling… my mom did the math once and less than 20% of what you had to sell for most school activities went to the actual activity. (It varies by activity.)

            Generally the kids who can’t afford a fee are also the kids who are never going to make enough money selling ice cream (yes, I distinctly remember the logistics of people catalogue ordering ICE CREAM and having to store it…) to cover the equivalent of that fee. But we tend to do the fundraiser to disguise that it *is* a fee, how much it is, and that if everyone else on the team chipped in an extra two dollars the kid who gets free hot lunch can also play a sport

        2. PuzzledLibrarian*

          Would you mind explaining to me how your reading contests worked?
          I have never heard of one were money was involved.

      2. Applesauced*

        I’m still kind of mad that when I read “Gone with the Wind” (just over 1000 pages) the middle school librarian counted it as 1.5 books in the book reading contest since “you’re such a good reader” when a typical middle school books is less than 200 pages.

        I wasn’t expecting credit for 10 books, but 1.5 is paltry.

        1. goddessoftransitory*

          Yes, punishment for achievement is so encouraging! Seriously, I get handicapping odds but this wasn’t a Vegas prizefight.

        3. DramaQ*

          I’m mad for you. That is quite the read for anyone, let alone a middle schooler. It should have counted as at least 2-3 books.

          I knew people who gamed the system and would find the books with the biggest print that hit the page count and read those. They’d brag about how fast they were reading because they knew and everyone else knew they certainly could be reading harder books than what they were picking. They just wanted to win.

          That shouldn’t count the same or close to the same as reading a 1000+ page book IMO. I get setting reasonable goals but it really should have been called out that they were gaming the system. Meanwhile the kid who read one 1000+ book is barely getting any credit.

      3. Hotdog not dog*

        When my kiddo was in elementary school they got points based on how many 10 minute increments were spent reading. That helped level the field for slower readers, and didn’t discourage anyone from choosing a longer book because it wouldn’t count for as many points.

        1. allathian*

          Yes, that’s the way they did it when my son was in elementary school. Now that he’s in junior high they just count the books the kids read, but my son doesn’t mind because he’s a fast reader and can read 1,000 pages in the same time it’d take his slowest classmates to read 200.

      4. Medium Sized Manager*

        When I was around 12, they changed the rules to be that every 100 pages counted as a book so that older kids weren’t penalized for reading big books, and I absolutely crushed it. Funnily enough, my dad thought that it was a bad change because it scammed the system in the opposite direction (I read so much that I finished the summer challenge in like, 2 weeks). There’s really no winning

        1. Reluctant Mezzo*

          I was assigned to read so many pages and write a report for a history class in college. So, I ended up with the six volume Moneypenny and Buckle Disraeli biography (the books were acquired in 1927 and I had to cut pages open on the last volume). I only had to write one report! So the next term the prof said we all had to read at three books. Sigh…

      5. Librarian of Things*

        Part of why we count minutes, not books, for our summer reading program. Whether you knock out 3 Beatrix Potter tales in 20 minutes or a single chapter of a Tale of Two Cities in 20 minutes, both are 20 minutes. May as well spend those 20 minutes reading something you find worthwhile. (Also, we have no prize for “Most Minutes” because it should be about quality, not quantity. You get a prize when you hit specified milestones. If you shoot way past the top level, good for you! But, no more prizes.)

          1. Hastily Blessed Fritos*

            You either trust self-reporting (same as for number of pages, unless you want them doing a book report on every title) or have parents verify (again, same as for number of pages).

          2. Great Frogs of Literature*

            All the programs I participated in as a kid were self-reported. (The librarians had a sense of who was reading a lot or a little.)

          3. Ev*

            Our library does it via self-reporting. The prize is a book – if you are the kind of kid who wants to lie to the librarian to get a free book, then the program is still getting you to read.

            1. Quill*

              When my mom’s class was still doing it (Circa 2019) it was self reported with parent signature. Theoretically the parents have a vague idea of whether their child has been seen in the company of a book recently.

          4. Librarian of Things*

            We ask them (or their parents) to self-report. I’m not really worried about kids trying to game the system to win extra free books or a slap bracelet, free scoop at the local ice cream shop, or pop-it keychain. I have plenty of tchotchkes and if I get more books into kids’ hands, yay, I win!

      6. anotherfan*

        i had to have my kids exempted from elementary school reading contests because it stopped being ‘we read for fun!’ and became ‘we only read if we get points! i’ve read my 10 pages, i’m done’ thereby turning readers into non-readers pretty darn quickly. the principal understood but some of the teachers were pretty blood-driven in getting their kids to ‘win’ points over other peers.

        1. Jennifer @unchartedworlds*

          As predicted by motivation research! Rewarding people is an incentive in the short term, but changes their relationship with the rewarded thing, so that they’re less likely to do it afterwards if/when the rewards are no longer there. This has been known for a fair old while, e.g. Deci & Ryan’s research which I think was 1970s or thenabouts. Alfie Kohn’s book “Punished By Rewards” is a useful resource.

          1. Zippity Doodah*

            the goal isn’t to get them to read, but to increase fluency in reading. Even if they never again read for pleasure, they’re still better equipped for life than if they still had to sound out every other word.

            1. MigraineMonth*

              That seems like a weird take. If a kid hates reading, then sure, getting their reading level up to fluency is great even if they never read for pleasure.

              If a kid already reads for pleasure, and you turn it into a task they’ll only ever do if they’re forced to or rewarded to, you’re not increasing their fluency (since they would have read already); instead, you’re taking away all the additional fluency they would have developed in the future when they read for pleasure.

              1. NotSoRecentlyRetired*

                Can I use that as my excuse to why I never liked to practice musical instruments? I still love performing in a group, but spending time practicing at home to fill out a form was not worth my time.
                Actually, my later-in-life analysis is that my parents knew it was arbitrary and didn’t require me to practice. That may have led to me not feeling the need to excel at anything. If I did no extra work I received a B on the test. If I studied the minimum amount I got confused and got a C. I had to study A LOT to get an A. There were other things I wanted to do instead of spending my time studying or practicing.

      7. Bibliothecarial*

        We started giving out books as the prizes, because even if they are only reading to win, the prize is they get to do more reading :)

      8. ferrina*

        I enjoy those! I was/am an avid reader who needed no encouragement, and it was always fun to see how quickly I could break the contest. And it helped my reluctant reader child- he didn’t like reading, but he liked winning more. And when he tried to make it too easy, I added bonus rules.
        It was really helpful to get him over the hurdle when reading is about sounding out each word and into the phase where he can recognize a lot of words on sight.

        *Assuming it’s an event where everyone who reads x pages/x minutes gets the same prize, and rather than a true contest of winners and losers.

      9. Mid*

        And I was a voracious reader so I was regularly interrogated about “actually reading all those books” and it was devastating to little Mid.

      10. sheworkshardforthemoney*

        I remember doing those but you had to explain the plot to the librarian before she let you have a new book. And certain books were off-limits because they were such an easy read and you couldn’t “read down”. The books had to be your grade level or higher.

      11. Hroethvitnir*

        Reading contests make no sense. As an inveterate reader it was like “awesome, they’re giving us free time to read??” and I can only imagine it’s stressful as hell if you struggle with reading. I can’t see how it’s helpful to make it even *more* stressful if it’s a struggle/you’re slow no matter what and any effort won’t be recognised/you have shame about struggling with reading/reading is made into a chore with no joy.

      12. Dek*

        As an avid reader, it absolutely blew my mind when I realized that my classmates were just reading picture books (or just writing down titles they didn’t even read) to win points.

      13. Crooked Bird*

        At my somewhat education-based summer camp, it was 1 point per page read. These counted as points for your team, which was a Big Deal. (Think “ten points for Gryffindor” from Harry Potter etc–the contest was ongoing and involved tons of events & was THE thing at that camp.) My brother was an incredible speed-reader and totally uninterested in standard camp activities or the outdoors. He racked up incredible page numbers. It took me somewhere between 4 & 6 years to figure out that the reason my team never, ever won was that 1) his team ALWAYS won and 2) the camp never put siblings on the same team.

        Before that revelation I low-key had an internal identity as a loser. After it… I was just so pissed off.

    6. nekosan*

      Yeah, same thing happened at our company, but at least (my!) group went for all sorts of different canned goods.
      I still was upset and donated cash direct to the food bank instead of participating.

    7. Zippity Doodah*

      if the goal really was to provide food for the food bank, they should have collected money. The food bank can buy in bulk, thus getting much more per dollar than you get from the grocery store.

      Plus they know what their customers want, while we don’t.

      1. Her name was Lola*

        You are brilliant. I work at a nonprofit that helps children. What we really need is cash donations-to get things for clients, pay staff, keep the lights on, etc. but people want to give stuff. Either old stuff they want out of their house, or fun stuff, like toys, that make them feel good. If I could, I would never take an in-kind gift again.

        1. Rosalind Franklin*

          Our kids’ school finally figured that out and started counting money as the “heaviest” donation of all during their competitive food drive. Kids are excited to bring in money to get ahead in the competition and food pantry is coming out ahead with money instead of expired cans of corn.

          1. Acronyms Are Life (AAL)*

            That’s cool, especially since sometimes food banks or other similar organizations can get items for even cheaper than we can, so the money goes further.

            I recall in elementary school every morning Admin would set up an area on the floor for each teacher’s name in the front of the school where we could drop off items. A can was +1 and a box of something was -1. Teachers would have ‘rivalries’ with one another and get their students to put their boxes in the other teacher’s section. I feel like it made it a little bit more fun.

        2. CommanderBanana*

          I volunteer at a shelter and we no longer take donations at all, except from a small group of specific people, because we got so tired of people using us a dumping ground for stuff they didn’t want but didn’t want to throw away.

          I sent an email to my neighborhood listserve to see if anyone had donations of very specific things at the start of the school year – formula, diapers, wipes, feminine hygiene products, school supplies – and got one box of old, worn-out men’s clothing and shoes on my doorstep, which I just threw away.

          It’s so tone-deaf. Why do you think anyone would want your husband’s smelly old house slippers?

          1. Insert Clever Name Here*

            I lived in Texas during Hurricane Katrina and volunteered to sort through clothes donated for the evacuees; I was surprised when the coordinator handed me gloves to wear while sorting. And then I got to an actual dirty pair of underwear and I understood. There were *multiple* items across various parcels of donated clothes that were clearly unwashed.

            I hope every one of those people who donated that stuff never get the cool side of their pillow in the middle of the night.

            1. Chirpy*

              I once helped sort food bank donations after a drive. Someone donated a half-used bag of flour.

              And it wasn’t the only opened food item. Come on, people. Would you really eat torn, opened packages of food yourself??? No, and you shouldn’t expect poor people to, either.

      2. JFC*

        Our company does a combination of this. One employee is very involved with the local food bank and always ask them which items they need the most. Then, when it’s donation time for us employees, we are specifically asked to either pick items on the latest list or money. The food bank needs can vary by season, at least here, so having a good relationship with them is a good way to make sure we’re not missing the mark.

      1. Orv*

        A friend used to sneak a scale into stores to increase his chances of getting valuable foil Pokemon cards. (The foil cards weighed a fraction of a gram more, and all packs had the same number of cards.) He’d weigh every pack and then buy only the heaviest ones. As a former engineering student I had to admire that strategy, even if it was kind of shady.

        1. Worldwalker*

          At a rock & mineral show, I once spent about half an hour weighing geodes in my hand, and comparing pairs of similar size. It worked: the resulting geode, about the size of a fist, which we called the “stone soap bubble,” had a wall about a quarter-inch thick, and the rest was this huge cavity. It was totally lined with smallish crystals and glitters so wonderfully. It was and is well worth all that time weighing rocks.

          We contemplated taking a small scale and a calibrated jar of water next time, to determine the specific gravity of the lightest candidates, but Covid happened. :(

        2. Max*

          So Lego has a blindbox collectible minifigure thing. Or rather, it’s blindbox now but used to be bagged. When they first switched to boxes, I think some people did legitimately bring scales to weight the boxes to find the figure they wanted. And that only ended because somebody realized there’s a QR code on the box you can scan to figure out what’s inside.

          1. Jaydee*

            Wait a second. Are you telling me that my talent of guessing the minifigure in the blind bag by feel is no longer of any use? Because I’m really good at it.

    9. H.Regalis*

      Engineers aren’t robots blindly adhering to GIGO. They knew that wasn’t the point of the contest and did it anyway just to win, which would be funny if the end result weren’t making things worse for people in need. This just makes them look like a bunch of assholes.

      2. zinzarin*

        Maybe they’re not assholes. Maybe they did this as malicious compliance to highlight the perverse incentive in the contest, while privately donating (more beneficial) cash to the food bank.

        Lots of conjecture and judgment going on over a shared anecdote here.

        3. CommanderBanana*

          Maybe they did this as malicious compliance to highlight the perverse incentive in the contest, while privately donating (more beneficial) cash to the food bank.

          It is interesting that you’re criticizing H. Regalis comment as “conjecture” when you’ve just written engineer fanfic.

      3. Orv*

        “Making it worse” depends on the alternate outcome. Maybe if they weren’t intrigued by the optimization problem they wouldn’t have donated anything at all.

      4. Engineering Degree Holder*

        There are plenty of stereotypes of what engineers be can like.

        Opinions can vary. I think these guys were glass bowls.

        Conjecture and judgment? Yeah

      5. commensally*

        Y’all. “Food pantry gets huge donation of brand-new shelf-stable versatile protein, which food pantries always need” is not a bad outcome or one that leads to hungry people.

        I suspect the reasoning was something like “they don’t need us to scour our shelves for expired canned spinach, what’s the most efficient way to use our discretionary money to buy new items in bulk that would be useful?” And good for them.

    10. WeirdChemsit*

      Kind of reminds me of when I was in high school, for spirit week each grade level would get a certain number of points for various activities/contests and whichever grade had the most points at the end of the week would win. The grade below us had a student who’s mom was the principal, so their grade won every year (usually the senior class won every year) so everyone was resentful of them. My senior year, we figured out that cash was worth more points than food for the food drive, so we waited until the last day of spirit week, donated most of our class funds to the food drive, and took a huge lead in the points race. The principal literally took her lunch break to go to the store to try and buy more canned food to put her kids grade back on top. We then donated the rest of our class funds, plus some extra money people had scrounged up and handily won. We got lots of complaints about it, but a “you’re complaining about us donating money to a food bank???” shut them up lol. Don’t miss the petty drama of high school lmao

      1. Rainy*

        My old institution did a point-based thing for a while where there were prizes you could “buy” with sufficient points, etc, you know the deal. You got a certain number of points every quarter that you had to give to your coworkers–your own points didn’t work for you, just for others. There were some small office appliances etc but they needed a ton of points so I assume the vendor thought it would never happen. My office, and I know we weren’t the only ones, started picking a name out of a hat and everybody gave that person any spare points (or sometimes all of them). So once a quarter, someone in the office was getting an espresso maker, and suddenly we didn’t have a contract with that vendor anymore.

    11. Delta Delta*

      I really don’t like food bank donation contests. Food banks do better with donated money than with items (they’ll tell this to anyone who will listen), and if the goal is to do as much good as possible, it makes more sense to support them in ways that actually help. Second, I am really upset when I see contests where a group/employer/department/whatever gets a prize for being creative with making a food bank donation “sculpture” out of canned goods or boxes. While it’s meant to be fun, it comes across as sort of sneering – “we have so much money we can sculpt with the food the poors have to get from the food bank.” Yuck. (Also probably someone in that department utilizes the food bank, and has to watch while they’re implicitly mocked. Dislike.)

      1. Friendo*

        The problem with this is assuming rationality when it doesn’t exist. Food banks prefer cash, but people are less likely to donate cash.

    12. Anon for This*

      We had something similar where they counted items donated, not weight. The following year when they again ran the drive they disqualified from the count packs of ramen noodles, single serve items like cereal, mac and cheese, cheese and cracker packages – you get the picture.

      1. Two-Faced Big-Haired Food Critic*

        Which is the kind of thing food banks need. Some of the people who visit there don’t have reliable cooking facilities.

      2. Also anon for this*

        We may have worked at the same place (although I’m sure this has happened at more than a few workplaces).

    13. Lego Accountant*

      This kind of thing actually happened at my high school. They were doing a drive to help low income families and doing it by number of items. Most of the classes were doing the same thing and bringing in a lot of cheap items (like Kool-Aid packets or creamed corn from the back of their pantries). My teacher for that class period actually had some common sense said we should instead try to get the largest variety of items. We worked together and got everything on the list of suggested items. By the end, we had a box that would be fit to set up an entire family – we had towels, toilet paper, food (put together by meals – including canned milk and margarine), feminine products, laundry soap, toothpaste, etc. We then decorated our box with wrapping paper and drawings. A different class won the “by the numbers” contest, but the group sponsoring the drive was so happy with our box that they came up with a second prize to give to my class for the most useful items.

      1. Worldwalker*

        Now that is an idea for a fairer contest: have the food bank give the class a list of what would go into a basic box, and count how many of such boxes were donated. Maybe they could also put a value on the box, so a certain cash donation would count as a box, too.

        1. Elizabeth West*

          That’s a good idea.
          My ex-work had a donation thing for International Women’s Day where we collected bras and feminine hygiene supplies. The big box was so full they had to get a second one. Not a contest, but people often forget that these things are needed.

          1. Rainy*

            When I was a team lead at the glitter factory (upscale homegoods chain), we had a leadership strategy meeting for all the regional team leads (just Karen the regional sales manager haranguing us for four hours) and were requi–I mean, strongly recommended–to bring donations of hygiene supplies for the glitter factory’s annual donation to local women’s shelters. So Karen took photos of us posing with baggies full of tampons so she could put it on the regional newsletter about how much community spirit the glitter factory had. I couldn’t afford to buy food on what they paid me–of course I didn’t bring a freaking donation. The glitter factory was in receivership at the time so I expect they weren’t donating money to charitable causes, but what cheek to try to force us to do it so they could take credit.

      2. Ellis Bell*

        This is what we do at my school when we collect food for hampers and banks; we stress the need for a varied, presentable box that looks like a practical but thoughtful gift. A senior teacher just got her own headship last autumn and she said she was so completely embarrassed by the quality of donations she went out and spent her own money on beefing up the Christmas hampers. She said: “Their idea of helping a struggling family feel like it’s Christmas is to toss them a mountain of outdated instant noodles in an old broken box”.

          1. JB*

            If you think the people who are donating expired food in a broken box would voluntarily donate cash, you are sadly mistaken.

            These are people who do not see any need to help others and are treating donation drives as a way to offload junk.

    14. In A Green Shade*

      I agree, but people also make terrible food bank donations regardless. The grocery store where I work used to have a box for food donations, and people would toss in open packages of cereal, canned items years past their sell-by date, extremely dubious supplements, etc. Eventually we got rid of the box because we had to throw the majority of the “donations” away.

    15. Two-Faced Big-Haired Food Critic*

      “When the rep from the food bank was awarding their victory certificate they actually said ‘you guys completely missed the point’.”

      Did they, though? The whole premise of judging the donations’ worthiness by weight sounds like feeding animals. If the organizers didn’t allow for the human factor — think about the *people* this is for — are the employees so much worse? Also, as others have pointed out, broth is nourishing.

      1. Broth Overload*

        I think we can trust that the rep from the food bank knows what donations will be the most worthwhile. Sure, broth is fine in some situations, but I’ve never sought out just broth for a meal unless I’m ill, and I think most people would need more nourishment than that. The point is that the bar for success shouldn’t be “you technically donated something edible,” it should be “you donated items that some people really need and will be valuable for them to have access to.”

        1. Insert Clever Name Here*

          So you have never, ever used broth in a recipe? Not to make rice, or soup out of various canned vegetables? And since you’ve never done that, people who need assistance with food will never do it either, right?

    16. Pokemon Go To The Polls*

      This reminds me of how my homeroom “won” the food drive in high school, and therefore a pizza party (woohoo?) – They counted by item, so just gathered $1/person and took the money to the local cheap grocery store and bought hundreds of ramen packets, since back then you could get a case of 20 for like $3 or something ridiculous. We won by a landslide and they never made the food drive a contest again

      I’m not sure how they could really do this better, since basing it off a monetary value just gives a pizza party to whichever home room has the kids with the richest/most generous parents, but not having a contest made the food drive pretty easy to ignore. I suppose to real solution is just making a world, or even just town, where food drives aren’t necessary because everybody’s basic needs are met, but I’m told that’s unrealistic.

    17. Blarg*

      When my otherwise not-great old boss retired, she asked that her retirement gift be a donation to the food bank taller than she was. We were a bunch of do gooder health dept employees, so everyone donated a ton of stuff and then we had fun building a food tower. She was pretty short, so we made it a good deal taller than her. Took her goodbye pics in front of it.

      It was the best and most fun thing she did in her tenure there.

      1. Elizabeth West*

        I love this and, since I’m tall, I may steal it. That’ll be a big tower. Although I may be working until I’m 90, and by then I might be shorter.

    18. Marzipan Shepherdess*

      That was a middle-school mean-kid level jerk move, not a clever way to game the system. People who need to go to food banks to feed themselves, their kids and often their elderly family members need healthy, substantial food – not cans of broth bought in bulk so that the well-fed buyers can win a contest.

      I repeat; jerk move, not “cute” in any way. If this were AITA-Reddit, those people would be labeled YTA.

    19. Elitist Semicolon*

      Similar story, also with engineers: the winner was whatever team brought in the greatest number of items, so a bunch of the engineers filled their barrel with ramen packets. and promptly won. The following year, the prize went to the team who raised the most money for the food bank – probably because most food banks here won’t take ramen or similar because the ratio of sodium to actual nutritive value is…not great.

    20. Midwest Bicyclist*

      We used the same metric for our competition one year. One team bought giant bags of water softener salt. Another bought huge bags of popcorn. The food bank director did appreciate the salt—they actually did distribute that. The giant bags of popcorn were not appreciated. The next year they changed the metric to give points based upon products on the “most needed item list.”

  7. Medium Sized Manager*

    We had a program years ago that was supposed to incentivize production, but the goals were SO achievable that people were making bank just for showing up to work. Management spent so much money on it that the “employee incentive” budget was wiped out for multiple subsequent years.

  8. mind bleach please*

    We had a judged grilled cheese competition at a Ivey league university. Different labs would come up with funny themes for their grilled cheese and present them to hungry folks in the department. One year, a grad student dressed in drag as Julia Child (with dress, voice, wine, and french music) to make 1 single grilled cheese with excessive amounts of flair. It was hilarious, except when it came time to present the grilled cheese to the judges. This grad student was wheeled out on a cart wearing nothing but a shiny gold banana hammock (that did not adequately cover anything) posing like “paint me like one of your french girls”. Who were the judges you might be wondering? the university chief of police and her 2 12-year old daughters.

    1. mind bleach please*

      The student was strongly reprimanded, but somehow allowed to participate the next year. He dressed as a priest, and gave a long speech about in his past he was a sinner who exposed himself to children, but now he had seen the light of Grilled Cheesus. The judge of this year’s competition, and audience to this speech was non other than the universities new president.

        1. mind bleach please*

          This student was legendary in the department. He set up the Student’s Name Library in the mens bathroom of a remote field station. The “library” consisted of about 150 old playboy magazines. The word infamous might actually be more accurate than legendary.

          1. Orv*

            That would have gotten you expelled at my college. A friend of mine very nearly got expelled when he accidentally sent a print job to the wrong printer. The print job? Porn. The printer? In a locked admin office, next to the secretary’s desk.

        1. Phony Genius*

          If only it had been served on that piece of toast with Jesus’s face on it from years ago. (Maybe it was?)

      3. Rage*

        I read something many years ago about a University that held a “most boring lecturer” contest every year. One year, the hands-down winner was a professor who stood with his back to the audience, wrote complicated formulae on the chalkboard, and droned on for about an hour on (I think it was) particle physics. Anyway, the next year he again claimed the top prize by simply repeating the same lecture.

      4. Six Feldspar*

        That is fantastic and another worthy addition to the “bread-related jesus shenanigans” category of internet legends

    2. Dust Bunny*

      This wold have been an all-night affair at our college events center and the banana hammock would have been absolutely the proper attire. But there would not have been preteen girls in attendance.

    1. Harper the Other One*

      I deduct points because it appears he admitted it rather than cheekily winking and declaring it a secret recipe!

    2. Slow Gin Lizz*

      I’ve always thought that one was just brilliant. I occasionally bring it up in regular conversation.

    3. Charlotte Lucas*

      Well, I think it would definitely have a “depth of flavor.” One of my common quick chili cheats is to add some jarred salsa. Look! Someone’s already married a bunch of flavors for me.

      1. Orv*

        The “secret ingredient” in my macaroni and cheese is Tony Chachere’s Creole Seasoning. I realized I was already adding pretty much everything in it, so why not? Oh, and a quarter cup of sherry, that’s important too.

        2. Insufficient Sausage Explainer*

          I’m getting images of Martin Crane raiding Frasier’s drinks cabinet and using the last of some very expensive Fino that Frasier had been saving for a special date!

          1. Orv*

            I do believe that it’s best to cook with alcohol that’s drinkable, but my standards for drinkable are much lower than Frasier’s. ;) Mostly I just draw the line at anything packaged as “cooking sherry,” since it usually has a ton of salt added.

      3. Red Reader the Adulting Fairy*

        if I have a partial jar of salsa in my fridge at chili time, I pretty much always throw it in to make sure it gets used.

            1. NotSoRecentlyRetired*

              I recently found a (very simple) recipe that was just a can of black beans, a jar of salsa, and 8 oz of frozen corn.
              Endless possibilities of flavors with the salsa choice.

  10. Academia Survivor*

    My old job had an end-of-year holiday bar crawl, that for some reason included a wall-sitting contest at one of the bars. My last year there, the contest was won by a woman who was an above-the-knee amputee who used crutches to walk most of the time. She had to be carried around by a friend to the rest of the bars that night, but the rest of her drinks we on us. She was an absolute legend around the office after that!

      1. Academia Survivor*

        Her amputation was in one leg, so she was balancing on one leg instead of two. Plus the fact that she had to be carried the rest of the night, probably harder!

        1. Cat Lady*

          Dang, she must have a leg of steel! Wall sits are exhausting enough with two legs, can’t imagine trying to do it with one.

  11. Chocolate Teapot*

    I have told the step challenge story here before, but here it is again.

    All company employees received a Fitbit tracker and connection details for a step logging site. The big step challenge was the equivalent of reaching the summit of a high mountain and there would be decent prizes for whoever got there first. (Ipads and so forth).

    We all received our trackers on a Friday. By Monday it turned out all the prizes had already been won by people running marathons over the weekend.

    1. 3-Foot Tall Inflatable Rainbow Unicorn*

      Not work related, but once upon a time there was a Potter-themed online running club that had a challenge awarding house points to whichever house racked up the most mileage.

      Slytherin promptly went out and recruited ultramarathoners.

    2. A Simple Narwhal*

      That must have been a bummer! My office used to do step-based contests but I like that they broke people into separate groups based on their baseline activity levels. It meant that people were motivated to walk more than they normally would, but didn’t have to worry about fruitlessly trying to compete with people who already ran 10 miles a day.

      Plus the prizes were distributed differently – each week you met your step goal you were entered into a raffle for a $20 giftcard of your choosing. So if you were in the 3,000 steps/day group and you hit that you had just as much a chance of winning a prize as the people in the 20,000 steps/day group. The point was to try and encourage people to be a bit more active and I think that was a good way to do it.

      1. Chocolate Teapot*

        I think it was the fact that the contest almost seemed to be over before it had started. The Powers that Be scrabbled round for some more prizes, but I think they were things like mugs, pens and T-shirts.

  12. TracyXP*

    My husband’s company thankfully does the step challenge in a good way. First of all, you don’t have to do it at all. But if you complete this challenge or any of the many options they have, it counts towards completing an activity and can get you up to $300 off of your health insurance for the year. I’m not on his insurance and he gets a discount for me completing it as well. And the competition lets you list yourself as anonymous for the actual step competition. Otherwise there is no reward.

    I’ve seen those food drives that get stupid. Someone brought in a 50lb bag of rice from a bulk store.

    1. Tippy*

      That’s how my old place did it as well (the steps thing). It also wasn’t super promoted unless you signed up for it so those who didn’t want to do it weren’t constantly bombarded or unintentionally guilted about not participating.

      1. A Simple Narwhal*

        Same! My company would send out an email to tell people there was an activity program starting and they were welcome to join it if they wanted. If you didn’t respond or sign up you never heard another peep about it. Announcements were done with a weekly email to participants so literally zero guilt or having to feel left out.

        It was one of the better office fitness(/”wellness”) programs I’ve seen, I grew up watching my dad compete in way too many office biggest losers contests. And he was super competitive so he would always do whatever he could to win and it was not healthy.

    2. Mouse named Anon*

      My former work place did one too but it was optional. If you uploaded your steps monthly for a year you got a gift card. Honestly it was not heavily advertised (I think it was actually thru our insurance) and hardly anyone knew about it. I got $50 out of it at the end of the year.

      1. MigraineMonth*

        My workplace has a “wellness program” where you can earn a couple of $50 gift certificates by earning points doing wellness things from going to preventive care visits/getting vaccines to “starting a new healthy habit”.

        Unfortunately, “starting a new healthy habit” requires logging into their website every day for 30 days to say how many steps I’ve taken or minutes I’ve meditated, and it’s just not worth it to me.

    3. No Tribble At All*

      I’ve seen the 50 lb bag of rice work well — my company did a drive where we bought rice and bagged it into small ziploc bags, which could be easily distributed. This was at the request of the food bank / elder care org (like meals on wheels), so don’t go doing it without approval!

      1. Charlotte Lucas*

        There are communities where that much rice would be welcomed at a food pantry, but you definitely need to check first.

        A friend whose family used a food pantry when she was a kid still talks about “the summer of chickpeas.” (Her mother was not a creative cook, and they did not belong to an ethnic group that used chickpeas in their cuisine. So, it was pretty much plain, cooked chickpeas.)

        1. semperfiona*

          my mother has a similar story: her story is called “the summer of smelt”. to this day she will not eat them. she’s now 80 years old

          1. Chauncy Gardener*

            Ugh. We had smelt for several summers because you could catch them for free.
            I can barely look at them now.

        3. Clisby*

          I’m sure my community would welcome rice at a food pantry, but rice is such a common food here (coastal SC). Here, I’d expect a 50-lb bag to be portioned into at least 1-2 lb portions.

    4. Cat Lady*

      I’m kind of curious – what options for activity do they have if you cannot or will not complete the steps challenge? I’ve heard of companies offering insurance discounts for people who do fitness challenges, and it’s always struck me as being unfair towards those who physically can’t do the challenge (e.g. a wheelchair user who can’t walk long distances) or won’t (e.g. a single parent who doesn’t have the energy between working and looking after the kids).

      2. JB*

        Not OP but our wellness program at work is based on a points system with an end-of-year points goal. Steps are just one way to earn points, you can also earn points for getting at least 7 hours of sleep; doing 30 minutes of physical activity; completing online assessments and educational courses; going to your annual wellness check-ups with your PCP; getting your routine vaccinations; and completing challenges that change from month to month.

        (I’m not necessarily endorsing this system. You also get points for signing up for a personal wellness plan or taking sessions with a lifestyle coach, which seems deeply sketchy to me.)

    5. Distracted Procrastinator*

      my company did a step challenge thing as part of a “health month.” you got 1 ticket in the raffle for every 1000 steps you took. However, there were other ways to get raffle tickets, that were health related but not activity related. A few people got crazy with their step counts and some people used it as an incentive to be a little more active and most employees completely ignored it.

  13. SmellMyFinger*

    Wet tshirt contest (!)

    Despite some decent talent, the chubby guy from IT ended up winning. Turned out he could REALLY twirk!

    2. A Penguin!*

      How does ‘wet tshirt contest’ make it into any workplace?

      I mean, I’m here everyday so I’ve read plenty of ridiculous workplace shenanigans, but still my brain is trying to revolt at this one.

  14. see you anon*

    My team ran/hosted an institute-wide winter holiday social in December. We had various activities, including a potluck, photo booth, and games where you could win small prizes. One of the games was going to be some sort of a basketball “most baskets in a minute” challenge. Except we couldn’t get a basketball hoop in time (the venue wouldn’t allow one to be attached to the wall), so we ended up using a large plastic plant pot my manager had in her office. The force of rapid-fire basketballs being thrown into the plant pot cracked it within minutes, and it was unusable by the end of the event. I think they may have even altered the game to cut it short once the pot got seriously damaged.

  15. Raisin Walking to the Moon*

    Two secretaries with the same uncommon name (let’s say Bertha) haaaaated each other. I don’t even remember what the contest was, but during the announcement, the organizer said the prize would be “ice cream, pizza, or whatever you want!” And Bertha1 just LATCHED ONTO that wording. She kept saying when she won, the prize would be that Bertha2 had to kiss her ass. She said it in every meeting, every time anyone mentioned the contest.
    She won. She yelled “Now Bertha’s gotta kiss my ass!”
    HR bought her a pizza.

    1. 3-Foot Tall Inflatable Rainbow Unicorn*

      Poor Bertha2! I’m surprised someone in charge didn’t have a quiet word with #1 to shut it.

      1. WantonSeedStitch*

        Seriously. If there was an HR department there to buy her a pizza, they should have been like “knock it off and act like a damn professional.”

        1. Raisin Walking to the Moon*

          I know, right? but it’s a family-owned warehouse, and believe me this was the least of it. it was the kind of place where people from different sides of the same town couldn’t work next to each other because of high school sports rivalry, and everyone used slurs.

          1. Orv*

            Family-owned businesses are often dens of dysfunction. (I almost said “hives of dysfunction” but bees are actually quite good at working together.)

          2. allathian*

            There are two kinds of organizations that I’d only consider working for if I had no other options, tech startups and small family businesses. Larger family-owned businesses can be okay to work for, provided they’re large enough that family members are a small minority.

            Sure, it’s understandable that family businesses want the next generation to take over at some point, but the good ones treat family members just like any other employees. The one family business I worked for early in my career went too far in the other direction, the young generation was put under so much pressure by their older family members that all of them went to work elsewhere because they found it impossible to meet the expectations of the family. They kept their shares, though, and at least two of them sat on the board at some point, but when the older generation died, they sold the company.

  16. Healthcare Manager*

    Not exactly a gone ‘terribly wrong’ story (although from the loser’s perspective it might have felt that way).

    Many years ago my work held a Mario cart (on Wii) competition. The final came down to me and a guy from IT, he was a typical arrogant guy, and I was newish to the workforce. He had a special gaming chair that he brought in for the final.

    We raced and I floored him.

    Every round to this point had been one round only to determine the winner. But he kicked up such a fuss about losing saying that the final should be best of three. I shrugged and said sure, even though changing the rules after losing screams sore loser.

    I floored him again.

    He sulked out the room and didn’t even say congratulations. He was pretty misogynistic and there was a def a part of him that couldn’t believe he was beaten by a woman.

      1. The Prettiest Curse*

        “I’m going to take my gaming chair and go home!”
        I really hope he attempted flouncing.

    8. NonMouse*

      Oh man, that reminds me of the ping pong tournament I participated in during an internship. At a tech company, so you can imagine the gender ratios. I did not win the tournament but I did win against the first guy I was up against. He got upset and asked me to play again (not as an official rematch)… I won again. He asked again… this went on for a bit. He would get noticeably upset as he was losing. Eventually he won once and was so excited. After that he never asked me for a rematch again lol.

      I don’t know what it is about office “sports” that really brings out the misogyny in some guys. This was not the only incident I experienced, in general or in that office or even in the context of that tournament. After that I was much more careful about what I agreed to participate in (to be fair, my actual team were all great and I enjoyed playing with them. but I only play with guys I actually know and trust now)

      1. Ancient Mariner*

        This reminds me of when I was a grad student at a very tech-oriented university where the atmosphere was extremely competitive and the gender ration 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.

      2. The Prettiest Curse*

        Not just in offices, either. Back when I was a regular lap swimmer, there were several of the regular male lap swimmers who clearly didn’t like the fact that I could swim faster than them. I always used to accelerate when one of them was in the next lane.

    10. MigraineMonth*

      I’ve always wanted to do this, but I’ve never actually been good enough at [game] or [sport] to do so. Thank you for letting me live vicariously through you.

      It is especially great that he didn’t figure that the *other person who made it to the finals* might be good at the game.

    11. CatMouse*

      Man, our office had a Smash Brothers tournament, winner git a Wii. Guy sitting next to me won. No drama, just some trash talk. Surpisingly decent place for a call center

  17. Former Retail Lifer*

    Around 2002, I was managing a store at a mall that had a contest: whatever store could collect the most emails for the mall’s email list would win a cash prize. The mall was DEAD, and the demographic that shopped at our store (mostly teenagers) just didn’t come to this mall. We would sometimes only have handful of customers come in all day, and, in the early 2000s, it was still possible for some not to have an email address. We were at a disadvantage…until one of my employees who was a club DJ on the side offered up his email list of close to 300 people. During the couple of weeks that the contest ran, we MIGHT have hit 100 customers total (but probably not). Nevertheless, we submitted almost 300 email addresses and easily won the contest.

      1. Ginger Cat Lady*

        Yeah, adding his emails to the mall’s list was not okay, people did not sign up for that. I think it’s not even legal to subscribe people without their consent any more.

        1. Former Retail Lifer*

          Oh, I’m sure it was already illegal back then, too. We knew we shouldn’t be doing it.

      2. Ally McBeal*

        No kidding! It’s election season here in the US and I’m drowning under all the campaign texts and emails, some of whom are addressed to two people who are not me*, and that’s on top of the unmanageable amount of normal spam I get. When I unsubscribe from emails I often see the little form asking why I unsubscribed, with an option of “I never signed up for this list, please report as fraud” – I don’t know if that actually counts as legal fraud in the US (maybe in the EU with their GDPR rules?) but if it is, the DJ was not only morally wrong but also legally wrong. I’d be furious if I was on the DJ’s list and would never shop at that store again – would probably file a corporate complaint too.

        *one of them MIGHT be my father, who paid the deposit on my cellphone plan way back in 2004, but it’s painful to see his name in texts because he and I are permanently estranged. The other recipient is named Daniel Hall despite my not ever knowing anyone by that name. I have no idea how to get his name/my number off all the lists bought and sold by political campaigns.

        1. Former Retail Lifer*

          His email list probably never knew it was us at the store who signed them up.

          To be clear, we DID know it was wrong. We were just broke people working retail and REALLY wanted that cash prize.

          1. Worldwalker*

            I have a way to give everyone a different email, if I take a moment to set it up. They all alias to the same catchall, but any list or business I give my email address to gets a unique one. I’ve been doing this for years. So I know who sold me out.

  18. Carolina*

    In our office, many people share a love for spicy food.
    Mark (fake name ofc) 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!
    Anyway, 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.

    1. Shellfish Constable*

      I burst out laughing when you got to the ambulance so I guess I’m the jerk here, but, seriously, that was a satisfying ending to that story.

      Also I think even the host of ‘Hot Ones’ has said the dumbest thing he ever did in his life was taken a bite of a Carolina Reaper.

      1. Juicebox Hero*

        The REAL satisfying ending came the next time he had to use the toilet… I believe the clinical term is “wolf ass”.

    2. Blarg*

      The first time I took my dad out for “good”sushi, I said “oh that’s real wasabi and is pretty spicy” and he took it as a challenge and scooped up all of it and ate it.

      Obviously not Reaper level but was funny watching him try to play it cool.

      1. Lizzay*

        The first time I ever had sushi I was sitting at the counter with a couple of friends in the middle of the afternoon (so we had the sushi chefs undivided attention), I forgot the green stuff was called wasabi & when I’d worked my way through the ‘safe’ sushi (again: my first time), I asked the chef for a recommendation & he said ‘wasabi fish egg nigiri’. Which I proceeded to put MORE wasabi on before eating it in one bite. Thanks, friends, for not reminding me what wasabi is!

    3. Hermione Danger*

      The whole time I was reading this story, I was imagining a person of my acquaintance who is named Mark IRL who would totally do this and I really kind of wish it had been him.

  19. Football fan*

    I worked at a printing company, and the CFO set up a monthly bonus that went to the employee who wasted the FEWEST materials each month. It was called the waste allowance, and was designed of course to encourage the employees who worked with the printing press to avoid waste. That sounds great, but it turned the pressroom guys into waste police and nearly devolved into fistfights and shouting matches when one employee saw another employee behaving wastefully. It was highly competitive, to the point that mistakes in the printed products would be ignored if it meant doing anything over or stopping work to fix the error.

    1. Slow Gin Lizz*

      Yeah, that’s a very short-sighted competition. I immediately could see that it would affect people’s work habits to the detriment of their work output and I’m surprised that the CFO wasn’t able to see that that would happen.

    2. Paint N Drip*

      “mistakes in the printed products would be ignored if it meant doing anything over or stopping work to fix the error”
      ooooooof just what a printing company wants -_-

      1. But Of Course*

        Yeah, I got a guy fired once for something that sounds like this. I worked for a company that made different versions of products for different language markets, and generally the art didn’t change except there’s a prohibition on either skulls or full skeletons in China, so the art for that market is different (I think it’s the skeleton, not that it matters much). One of the print vendor shift managers decided he could do a fast plate changeover by just changing the second black plate which had the text on it so suddenly we had an entire shipment (possibly millions of individual products) that could not be used in the Chinese market. I caught the issue in reviewing the first-off-lines and escalated it. I heard later the guy got fired. But we are literally paying you to do the job right, not to do it fast. Fast doesn’t matter to us. Not causing an international incident matters to us!

        1. NotSoRecentlyRetired*

          My dad was QA on the floor of a printer/plotter manufacturer in the 1990s. You know the symbol for “do not immerse in water” with the red circle and the diagonal bar across it? He rejected (on delivery) the shipment from the printer of stickers with the diagonal going the wrong way, citing loss of integrity of the company if the items were delivered to particular customer countries. His boss overruled it. From my recollection it went to the division president.
          He didn’t win the battle, but you know he won the war. When he saw the stickers out on the manufacturing floor he snatched them up and tossed them all in the trash.
          (Note that in the past decade or so I’ve seen the diagonal going both ways in the US. In one neighborhood in Calif, I saw individual “No left turn” slash signs of both directions at the same left turn lane!)

    3. allathian*

      Play stupid games, win stupid prizes. Or how to run your business to the ground by rewarding employees for the wrong things.

  20. Former Utahn*

    I used to live/work in Utah, which is majority a certain religion that does not allow drinking. We had a chili contest, and one of the entries (new to the state and not religious) forgot and made their chili with beer. Luckily they remembered before the contest started and labeled their entry that it contained beer so people could make an informed choice. However, one of the managers (who was religious) kept an eye on said chili, made a note of any employee who was religious and chose to eat it, and tried to get them in trouble with the church. I believe the union/HR had to get involved

    1. Former Utahn*

      I will also add that this same manager threw a big stink about the office adding a coffee maker to the break room (said religion also doesn’t allow coffee), including trying to get rid of the coffee maker when no one was looking, standing outside of the break room to complain about the smell of coffee (his office was nowhere near the break room), and trying to report employees for being “on mind-altering substances at work”.

      While he was told to cut it out, he was not formally reprimanded for any of this because his boss was also of the same religion. Oh Utah…

      1. NotBatman*

        Holy crap. AAM had that link to the article on “Dark Knights of the Workplace” a while back. This is “Spanish Inquisition of the Workplace” level nonsense.

      1. Charlotte Lucas*

        Yes! It can also affect people in recovery, too!

        I always label for allergens or potentially problematic ingredients.

        1. Azure Jane Lunatic*

          And I know it’s appreciated!

          I know at least two people who have hospitalization-level alcohol reactions, possibly due to lacking the enzyme that lets most people digest moderate amounts of alcohol.

    3. PurpleLlamaofDoom*

      As a member of said religion, for holy bananapants! The beer cooks out and just makes it taste better. If you have a problem with that, you shouldn’t use vanilla extract either. And the manager absolutely had no business “telling on” those employees. What a glass bowl.

      1. popcorn passing*

        Me too- same religion, different state. One of my friends worked with a group of youth from that state, and she said, “Provo kids are a different breed.”

        He probably refuses to eat anything with red wine vinegar and coffee cakes XD

        1. allathian*

          Or any vinegar, all of it is basically wine that’s been intentionally allowed to go bad, or spirits that have had acetic acid bacteria added after distillation (spirit vinegar).

      2. nerdgal*

        Yes. I had a very nice subordinate of that religion whose wife was a fantastic cook. Every time he would bring in one of her dishes, we would beg for the recipe. That’s how we all learned that cooking sherry, extracts, etc. were acceptable. (I’ll never forget her cinnamon rolls.)

    4. Disappointing Aussie Office Gumby*

      Also LDS, but different country. Guys like that make the rest of us roll our eyes.

      Yeah… I’ve met Utahns like him. Prolly served his mission in Pleasant Grove and hasn’t ever set a foot outside the Wasatch Front.

      Maybe it’s the Aussie in me, but I’d completely be calling him out on his attitude.

  21. Stuart Foote*

    When covid rolled around, one of our team started a fun miles walked/ran competition, where everyone would get paired up into teams to see which team got the most miles. However, I’m a pretty serious runner and the other 20 or so folks who signed up were not, so there was no way to put me on a team without giving that team a huge edge in their mileage goals. So I ended up on my own solo team competing against teams of 5-6 each. Unfortunately for me, some dude on anther team put in a 20 mile hike on the last weekend of the competition, so I didn’t end up winning.

    It was a fun contest though…voluntary, and combined personal and team goals so there was something for everyone.

  22. lyonite*

    We had one of those steps competitions at my old job, only it was team-based rather than individual. The prize wasn’t specified but the implication was it would be something good. My group put together a team and then proceeded to get waaay too into it. Daily group walks, shaming anyone who wasn’t meeting their totals, going out of their way to walk places on a work trip, the whole deal. I wasn’t nearly so into it, but the team aspect meant I was stuck doing as much as I could. Eventually, after all that, we managed to win (for our division? the whole company? I don’t remember). Speculation ran rampant what the prize was going to be–an iPad? fancy headphones? Weeks went by and no prize arrived, and our self-appointed team leaders went out with increasingly vigorous follow-ups to try to get them. Finally, the longed-for prizes arrived: cheap plastic “balance boards” emblazoned with the company logo. That was the last time I competed in a workplace challenge.

    1. Pam Adams*

      The last time I did a step contest, I was recovering from an injury, and could do maybe 4000 steps a day.
      Luckily, it was team-based, ad I was assigned to the team from our campus Veteran’s Center- we won easily.

  24. Michigander*

    This is a story from a coworker. He used to work at a big company, insurance or banking or something. One morning everyone came in to find memos (this was far enough in the past that paper memos were still a thing) on their desk announcing that whoever saved the company the most money could win £10,000! People went all out for this competition, coming up with all kind of new ways to save the company money.

    The prize was a lottery ticket.

    1. Lab Boss*

      Oh man… that’s a really harsh lesson about noticing the word “could.” What a jerk move by them.

      1. Michigander*

        It didn’t go over well but I don’t think there were any long-term repercussions for the company. Just unhappy employees who probably didn’t try as hard in the future.

    4. Jackie Daytona, Regular Human Bartender*

      Woooooowww. I wonder what the fallout was. Never a good idea to hoodwink employees.

      1. A Simple Narwhal*

        Reminds me of the company (I think it was fast food or retail) had a big contest where the big prize was a Toyota – and it turned out it was actually a “toy-yoda”, just a stuffed animal. People were Not pleased.

        2. Orv*

          I think that ended in a lawsuit, but not a successful one, if I remember right. It wasn’t so much the value of the Toyota that the “winner” was mad about, it was feeling humiliated in front of their coworkers when they were excitedly taken out to the parking lot to see their “prize.”

        3. Ms. Norbury*

          I remember reading about it. It was a chain restaurant (Hooters, I think) that offered a prize to the server who sold the most beer within a period. The winner was not just displeased, she actually sued, and won! Aparently, it’s a whole case study in contract law.

    5. Jonathan MacKay*

      That’s on par with the radio station promising a Toyota…… only to give out a Toy Yoda.

      I believe the lawsuit was NOT in their favour…

  25. DeskApple*

    Halloween costume contest except I ended up being one of 3 people out of a 150 person company who actually participated. As the youngest in the company by 25 years I felt like an idiot. I don’t know why they had the contest each year when nobody else took part.

    1. Mouse named Anon*

      This sort of happened to me too. One year I thought it would be cute to be Banana’s in Pajamas. I wore a Banana costume and PJs over it. Well the end of the banana stuck out over the top of my pants. It looked a you know what….*cringe*. No one knew who/what I was and there were lots of snickers. I was mortified.

      1. DeskApple*

        as someone who was terrified of bananas in pajamas this is hilarious beyond all reason and helped heal my inner child.

    2. Two-Faced Big-Haired Food Critic*

      I think as long as you didn’t go into a C-suite meeting in costume, rattle your plastic pumpkin and say “Trick or treat!” you should have been okay.

      (Poor Tiana. I still cringe, thinking of that.)

      2. NotSoRecentlyRetired*

        One Halloween back in the ’90s, when there were at least 10% in costume at work, I dressed as a “mime” with white face and a tuxedo t-shirt. I communicated with hand signals and without speaking until around 2:00 when I had to present to the management team of my division. There was a costume competition that day at lunch, but I was too busy working to compete.

  26. Accentuil*

    Once in an old job, we had a contest about, I kid you not, who would be able to better mimic a colleague’s accent or behaviour. A group of us told our CEO that kind of contest was not fit for a workplace, there was too much potential for things to go south. He laughed in our faces and told us that we were just a bunch of Cassandras.
    You can only imagine how well the contest went. However, the highlight of the event was one colleague deciding to imitate the CEO, from his very strong accent to his habit of picking his nose.
    It was both glorious and horrifying. The CEO was shocked, to say the least. He never organized anything else, ever.

    5. allathian*

      Ha! Well, you were a bunch of Cassandras for telling him that his idea would end badly. He didn’t believe you, and got his just comeuppance. The colleague who imitated the CEO won the day, though.

  27. anon this time*

    When I was articling, our law firm advertised an annual Halloween “Costume Contest.” I wrangled the other articling students to compile a group costume with different roles from Monty Python and the Holy Grail. I made and painted tunics. It was a whole thing.

    Day-of, we get changed, and quickly realize we were the *only* people in real costumes. The other ‘contestants’ were, like, a legal assistant wearing a pair of dollar store devil horns added to their regular business casual outfit. We tried to back out, but no, the firm insisted on making us parade into the lunch room so the contest could be judged by all of the law firm partners. I would certainly say we felt judged. Obviously, we won.

    The kicker? The prize turned out to be a single, cheap, light-up pumpkin decoration. We stuffed it in someone’s closet immediately – after all, it’s not like the four of us could share it.

    1. Liane*

      At least you won. I’ve worn my Jedi robes to work at (In)Famous Retailer and they ALWAYS lost to thrown-together, minimalist, &/or cheap full costumes, usually bought from the store’s Halloween aisle.

      This Jedi ensemble is (except for boots & lightsaber) handcrafted and one of my costumes for the Rebel Legion Star Wars cosplay club, and, had to meet that org’s standards.

      And a full MP Holy Grail group costume is just amazing!

      2. But Of Course*

        As someone who definitely goes more on the side of cosplay than costume, I’m not surprised. Cosplay is generally elaborate to create and wear, and the skill that goes into it takes skill to recognize, but people GET the kind of jokes that Halloween costumes reflect. I’ve lost multiple costume contests that I didn’t want to be in (but you can’t show up in a thousand-dollar outfit that represents many, many hours of work and not participate apparently) because someone named Chad was wearing an invisible dog leash as a noose to go as a “hanging chad” in 2002 or someone did a Son of Man costume with a bowler and a fake apple. Those jokes are gettable.

        1. CatMouse*

          My favorite was a supervisor dressing up as a fisherman, with a fishing rod, the bait was a sign “Enter password”

          1. Admin of Sys*

            Oh I like that!
            We had someone show up to an office as Death to computers once – they’d grabbed a standard death cloak and cardboard scythe – but then decorated the scythe with magnets from inside of harddrives. So he could legit kill things if he got it too close to any of the hardware. Mostly, he used it to warp the edges of crt monitors, but it was still very very nerve-wracking until he took it back out to his car.

      3. I am the one who ties*

        I spent two months growing a beard for my Heisenberg / Walter White costume. I didn’t lose, but I ended up in a tie with someone who just wore a mask he got for $15 off Amazon.

      4. Chirpy*

        Same! I refuse to wear my Rebel Legion costumes at work, because I put too much effort and money into them to wreck them doing dirty retail, where my coworkers are wearing dollar store devil horns.

        If they want to see me dress up as a Twi’lek Jedi, complete with silicone head tails and body paint, they can come to a Rebel Legion event.

      5. Chirpy*

        Yeah, I don’t wear my Rebel Legion stuff to work, no matter how much they ask. I work in a dirty retail job and my screen-accurate costumes cost too much time, effort, and money to make.

        Besides, everyone else wears like, light up devil horns from the dollar store, if anything at all.

      6. Helen Waite*

        I remember costume contests from the days of yore in which people who came in actual costumes that took effort winning nothing, but the guy who wore a cheap wig and a dress would win.

        This happened at more than one company. The last time this happened, the HR department was judging.

    3. squirmet*

      Ughh I’ve been here! My previous office once announced a Halloween costume contest. I’m not much of a costume person, but I do like to participate in “fun” things when the chance arises. So I showed up as “Miss Universe,” featuring head-to-toe galaxy print, plus a sash and tiara.

      Aaaaaand nobody else dressed up. We all sat at our desks and worked 9-5, with a quick 5 minutes around 2pm to announce the winner. I won, but did I really?

  28. Ole Pammy's Getting What She Wants*

    not tooooooo terrible, but here we go! for context – we are all able bodied and at that time, ranged from young gen X to older gen Z, and we are based in Chicago. My office had a step challenge a few summers ago, and it went as expected for the most part – some people cared more than others, those who didnt really exercise regularly quietly sat at the bottom of rankings, etc. One of my colleagues kept being a small amount ahead of the highest-ranked person each day when we looked at yesterday’s rankings. most of us were syncing before we went to bed at night and just letting the contest run its course with our regular activities. Not colleague V though! Some of us finally figured out that she was waiting for us to sync each night, then pacing her apartment to get juuuuust above the highest-ranked person each day, at like 1150pm. My strong sense of justice couldnt handle this, so i started walking to and from work (a little less than 3mi) every day and just waiting to sync until the end of the contest. Colleague V was SURE of her landslide win, until i beat her in another landslide once i finally synced my device hahaha :)

    1. Mutually supportive*

      I was involved in a step type competition and you had to upload within 48 hours to avoid exactly this! If you didn’t do it in the timescale, those steps were lost.

  29. Senate Intern*

    In college I interned at a (now retired) Senator’s office in DC. It was an annual tradition to do a ‘milk challenge’–drink a gallon milk in an hour and keep it down. This happened during work hours in the senate offices. The staff and interns competed and it always led to copious vomiting in a bathroom that was used by both staffers and visiting public.

    The previous year, a lactose intolerant staffer attempted the challenge, and apparently destroyed the bathroom from both ends.

    There was a weird kind of bro-culture in the office/on Capitol Hill and instead of this getting the challenge shut down, it lived on as a legendary tale of commitment to the bit. People would describe it with awe in their voices.

    1. Lab Boss*

      When I was in high school, there was a series of lunchtime contests for “spirit week” that included “who can drink the most whole milk in 5 minutes.” Each grade got to pick its representative, so up on stage went 4 offensive linemen from the football team. One guy was rapidly approaching the gallon mark (yes, in under 5 minutes), announced “I’m gonna puke,” tried to keep going, and then lost it on stage with a dozen or so people in the splatter zone. I, at least, made it to the bathroom first.

    2. Margaret Cavendish*

      It was an annual tradition to do a ‘milk challenge’–drink a gallon milk in an hour and keep it down.

      I…uh…um…why??

      There was a weird kind of bro-culture in the office

      Ah, yes. I get it now.

      1. Dhaskoi*

        It’s supposedly a long standing thing in professional sports, possibly apocryphal, and Jackass (remember them?) did a bit on it back in the noughts. Not surprising that a bro-y office picked up on that.

    4. anonymous here*

      Some years ago a high school science teacher was fired for running an “experiment” where students chugged milk til they got sick.

      Smithfield High School in North Carolina if you want to google it.

    5. Charlotte Lucas*

      I have never heard of this kind of challenge. Then again, I live in the Midwest and am pretty sure many of my colleagues could do this as a regular lunch, not any sort of challenge.

      1. Ohio Duck*

        Right?! Given a whole entire hour, I know a bunch of people who could handle this without a struggle. Including at least one person who has packed just milk for lunch.

      2. Rainy*

        I am from the Midwest originally, and long long ago knew a guy who would casually eat a dozen hard boiled eggs while standing in front of the open fridge deciding what to actually eat. He was built like the shed they store the linebackers’ gear in and, as he was at the time an enlisted man in the army and they were making him do extra PT to try and get his weight down (he was approximately negative 5% body fat, by the way, and when you make the dude who’s just a giant muscle with a buzz cut do extra PT, he gets HEAVIER) so he was hungry *all the time*.

  30. Lab Boss*

    In the same vein as the step contests, my workplace encouraged hydration by doing a “who can drink the most ounces of water in a month” challenge. Now, I’m a thirsty boy and usually drink about a gallon of water at work each day. I’m also a competitive boy, and doubled my usual intake. I wasn’t the only one. Meetings began to run late as key attendees were stuck in the bathroom line. Accusations of cheating flew (Not to put too fine a point on it but I still don’t believe you drank 4 gallons of water on the last day to beat me, FERGUS). It was never officially recognized as a failure, but it’s never been brought up since.

    1. Slow Gin Lizz*

      That’s actually really dangerous, since it is in fact possible to drink so much water that your electrolytes get out of balance and can cause a serious health emergency. I suppose any contest can be overdone by the extremely competitive and cause serious health problems, but I think that a lot of people would be aware of the possible issues that, say, walking too much could cause, whereas most people think that drinking a lot of water is healthy and don’t realize that drinking too much can actually kill you.

      1. Decidedly Me*

        There was a really well known case of this where I grew up that ended in a death. You can find it by searching for the Hold your Wee for a Wii contest.

        1. Slow Gin Lizz*

          Yup, I was thinking of that case too. It has happened a couple of times where marathon runners, thinking they were being good and hydrating, have died because they drank too much water but didn’t ingest any electrolytes (it’s called hyponatremia). I naturally have low sodium and potassium levels and when I exercise need to be sure I eat a lot of salt or drink Gatorade rather than water. If I just drink water I can get into trouble or at least get a really awful headache. People often think if you’ve got a headache while exercising that means you’re dehydrated, but it’s just as likely that it means you’re over-hydrated but under-electrolyted.

        3. PurlsOfWisdom*

          First place my brain went too! I lived in that city at the time this happened and remember being HORRIFIED by this. My Cassandra tendencies activated as soon as I heard about it and I just knew someone would get horribly sick from this… I didn’t predict extreme enough as it turned out.

          As a broke college student, did I want a Wii? Yes.

          Did I also know better and not enter? Also yes.

      2. Lab Boss*

        Another reason it wasn’t a good idea for sure! I’ve had my own brush with hydro toxicity (drinking a ton of water while working outside and sweating all my electrolytes out) and I can say, your average person will feel uncomfortable and stop drinking before they get to the point of being in real danger- but for the overly competitive, it’s a risk.

        1. Slow Gin Lizz*

          Good point, most people will stop drinking before there’s any danger, but of course it’s the highly competitive that I was worrying about, such as in the case Decidedly Me mentioned. At least at your workplace they were allowed to pee. I can’t even imagine not being able to pee after drinking a lot of water. If I drink too much water I have to pee SO badly it hurts, several times over the course of a couple of hours. It’s hard to explain to my friends that I am a camel and really don’t need to drink as much water as they do; no, I’m not thirsty and yes, I still have to pee. (I’m a hiker and I know that if the temperature is mild I really won’t need much water but I will need a lot if it’s hot out; still less than most people, though.)

        2. Orv*

          There have been a number of medical emergencies caused by it at the Grand Canyon, when people took the warnings about dehydration a bit too seriously. (Dehydration is a serious danger there, but the trick is to carry enough water and drink when you’re thirsty, not to constantly drink whether you’re thirsty or not.)

          1. Slow Gin Lizz*

            Yah, I suspect it’s the bottled water industry who has convinced people that you should drink even when you’re not thirsty. I mean, it’s fine to drink a little when you’re not thirsty to try to prevent dehydration, but if you’re peeing every 45 minutes then you are drinking way more than your body needs and you are just wasting water (and all that time spent peeing).

  31. Jonathan MacKay*

    An old job of mine had a ‘guess the amount of candy in the jar’ set up every Halloween – but only the people in the office knew about it. If you set up a contest, but limit the number of people who know about it – you’re going to find your participation levels very low, aren’t you?

  32. Anon Attorney*

    A few years ago there was a cookie contest at my husband’s workplace. He placed in 2nd, while a colleague brought in her *professional pastry chef* partner’s cookies and won. To this day he’ll bring up how it was unfair and he should have won.
    (Context – he’s in a majority female workplace and they all adore him, it’s a lighthearted bitterness.)

    1. Cookies For Breakfast*

      This happened to me too. I came 3rd in a work bake-off, with a special cake from my home country, and the person who won (a guy we all adored) had brought in a cheesecake several of us suspected his food blogger girlfriend of making.

      It was absolutely wonderful cheesecake. 2nd place person and I couldn’t bring ourselves to complain. I’m just sad I never got the recipe!

      1. Anon Attorney*

        Yes, it seems so petty to complain but it’s just not right!! It feels like being a kid and getting a worse grade than someone whose parents clearly did the assignment for them. I’m glad it was delicious though!

        1. Dhaskoi*

          >It feels like being a kid and getting a worse grade than someone whose parents clearly did the assignment for them.

          I once got a lower grade on an assignment because my teacher thought my parents had helped when they hadn’t! (but she never told me this was the reason and I only found out much later through school gossip, so I couldn’t dfeend myself).

          Am still a tiny bit bitter 30 years later? You bet I am.

    2. many bells down*

      Wasn’t a work thing, but I’m reminded of the time I entered my 4 year old in a costume contest with an entirely handmade Victorian Jane dress from Disney’s Tarzan. She lost to a kid whose parents clearly just spent a grand at the Disney store. I’m still bitter.

        1. many bells down*

          Ironically, I would have just bought my kid a costume but she had her heart at in being Jane and despite it being a recent movie at the time, the costume just did not exist. We even went to DISNEYLAND and couldn’t buy one.

      4. Lizzay*

        We had a holiday party with a costume contest (‘dress like a character from a holiday movie’) once & my home-made John McClane (ok Joan) outfit, complete with a (very obviously toy) gun taped to my back lost to a guy who wore … an ugly sweater. I was furious! I could have lived losing to Elf, but to an ugly sweater?!

    3. CommanderBanana*

      I earned the enmity of some coworkers for winning a baking contest my first week at my old job. A coworker who usually won (she’d worked as a baker) placed second. I won again at the next baking competition and after that they stopped having baking competitions because people were so butthurt about it.

      I honestly didn’t care, I don’t remember if there was a prize and if there was it was probably like a $25 gift card or something. I was an enthusiastic amateur baker but I credit winning with using really good recipes that I had made multiple times before and knew would be good.

      I generally dislike and don’t participate in competitions of any sort at work, because there are always people who get way too competitive and ruin it for everyone, or people who get way too upset when they don’t win. I’m not a competitive person by nature.

      1. Paint N Drip*

        Aw I can see myself in this same position x_x
        The fact that they STOPPED having the competition is wild

      2. Anon Attorney*

        OMG I can’t believe they stopped it after you won. Contests should definitely be lighthearted.

      3. PhyllisB*

        The church I used to attend started having a homemade ice cream judging in the summer. Now I make a killer homemade vanilla ice cream so I won three years in a row. (No prizes, just bragging rights and your photo on the bulletin board.) The fourth year they asked me to please not enter so someone else would have a chance. But would I please bring ice cream to serve? LOL.

    4. Gumby*

      One of my workplaces had a pumpkin pie contest near Thanksgiving one year. My manager made his pie from scratch – like he started with an actual pumpkin. A bunch of people did the normal thing and started with canned pumpkin puree. (I made a pumpkin-shaped cake from 2 Bundt cakes, just to provide food wasn’t really trying to be in the contest.) The HR department bought a pie from Costco. There was a blind taste test and the Costco pie won. About mid-way through the afternoon they admitted that is what they had done and the prize was re-awarded to the second-place winner. It was probably a $25 gift card or something, nothing huge. But even that injustice couldn’t be borne.

  33. Sneezy*

    My workplace had a automation/AI contest – submit your idea for how to automate a process, and if it was chosen to be developed and implemented you’d win $1000 worth of employee reward points. I put a lot of effort into my entry and spent days tweaking it to be perfect; I even made some fun graphics for its submission page. I actually really wanted my ideas to be implemented, because they’d have made my and my colleagues’ working lives a lot easier. My boss at the time, Fergus, had also submitted an idea, but his entry was only a few sentences and not well-thought-out or useful.

    Initially my submission got a lot of “likes” and great feedback, but after a few days I noticed some comments coming in from coworkers I knew Fergus was friendly with that said things like, “this has already been suggested” or “Fergus already had this idea.” I had another look at Fergus’ entry and found he had replaced his original entry with mine – word for word. He even stole the graphics I’d created. So not only had he stolen my work, he’d recruited his friends to push the narrative that I was the copier. Someone even reported me to the team running the contest as a plagiarist. I had no choice but to go to HR, and it was found that Fergus had copied me (fortunately the system kept track of when people edited their entries). To “keep things fair” both entries were removed. Fergus was never punished to my knowledge, and my other team leads made excuses for him.

    I don’t enter work contests anymore.

    1. Irish Teacher.*

      How is that “keeping things fair”? I could see it, MAYBE I’d they didn’t know who copied, but when they did, the fair thing to do would be to disqualify him and let your work stand.

      I know you probably don’t have any insight into their bananapants reasoning, but just…what the flip?

      1. Sneezy*

        Well, about a year after this incident I found out that the head of HR was besties with my director, and my director loved and protected Fergus. Fergus had also been accused of bullying, sexual harassment and numerous other ethical violations and always escaped unscathed. He was finally let go last year when it was discovered that he had been committing time theft and encouraging his cabal of favourite employees to do the same.

        1. Zombeyonce*

          It’s never just one thing with cheaters, there are always multiple threads showing their lack of ethics.

        2. ferrina*

          Oooh. That makes so much sense.

          When I saw your first post, I was pretty sure that that wouldn’t be the only sketchy thing that Fergus had done. It takes a lot of bravado to do that, and that is usually built up through practice. If I were HR, I would have been looking deeper at Fergus, because brazenly cheating in a contest like that speaks a lot to your ethics in general.

        3. Rainy*

          A member of leadership at my last job urged me to take sick time (our sick and vacation were separate buckets) for some of my vacation time as I was leaving, and I’m pretty sure it was a trap. Even if it wasn’t a trap, it’s definitely not the only unethical thing she’s done at work. I found out recently from a former colleague that she’s been the target of at least one hiring discrimination claim.

      2. The Prettiest Curse*

        Honestly, the contest Fergus won here is for best imitation of an AI, given the stealing of other people’s work and the repetition of false information.

    3. goddessoftransitory*

      So Fergus DOESN’T get in trouble for theft, but you lose your chance to win???

      I don’t think your company knows what “fair” means.

  34. Curt Sawyer*

    Back around 2000 we had a project team dinner / social event and I purchased an iPod as a give-away prize. We didn’t specify no dates / no significant others (to be best of my recollection), but it was understood that it was for employees /project team only. Well, it was understood by all but the one person who brought a non-employee date. And when people grabbed numbers out of a hat to see who matched with the iPod winning number, the date also decided to pull a number. Can you guess what happened? The date’s number was the winning number. Today, I would shut that down and stopped her from participating, but at the time I was around 30 and wasn’t in charge of the project (I was just the one who bought the iPod), so I didn’t know what to do and the date ended up taking the iPod.

  35. Nicki Name*

    A few jobs ago, my company’s space underwent a big remodel. It held a contest to name all the new conference rooms it was going to have. For some reason submissions needed to come from teams of at least two people, and the list of names had to have a coherent theme.

    I came up with a list and convinced a colleague to let me put their name as the second submitter. After the contest ended, there was silence for weeks… and then they finally announced that they’d be using a mixture of names from three different themed lists. All three of those teams, one of which was mine, were declared winners.

    Due to the long delay and the fall-off of interest, I may be the only person who actually claimed their prize (expensing $50 toward lunch at a fancy restaurant).

    1. Lab Boss*

      They mixed the lists? So like… one team suggested the conference rooms be named after Harry Potter characters, one team suggested National Parks, and one suggested Seasons, and you ended up with conference rooms named Hagrid, Denali, and Autumn? That’s a fascinatingly weird decision.

        1. Kara*

          By any chance, were there three floors and each floor had one of the themes? Or did they truly just mix and match?

      2. Jen MaHRtini*

        Based on some details in Nicki Name’s post I don’t think we worked at the same place, but I had the same thing happen except is was 7 names from 7 themed lists.

    2. Roscoe da Cat*

      I was reading through and read this as the conference room ran the contest which would have been a great story!

      Also, did no one suggestion Mr. Roomy McRoomyface?

    3. The Formatting Queen*

      I have participated in (and organized) a couple different “conference room naming” contests over the years. For some reason the committee choosing from the entries never liked my go-to idea of naming them after prisons: Alcatraz, Sing Sing, Riker’s Island, Shawshenk, etc. Blah blah something about “inappropriate for work” and “wrong connotations.” But I know deep down everyone thought it was funny. “Oh I’m going into Leavenworth right now but I’ll get back to you in 20 to 30 years. Minutes. I mean minutes, but with this meeting it will feel like years.”

  36. Burton Guster*

    We had a steps contest at a school I worked at. They put us in randomly assigned teams to try to make it less individual pressure…but the PE teacher and the person who trained for and ran marathons ended up on the same team, so nobody else even tried.

  37. HigherEdExpat*

    Another from the fitness tracker horror story field: As my user name suggests, this story took place at a university… a D2, urban campus. This means that the Athletics division won handily every time there was a competition, as in addition to their general duties, the athletics facilities were minimum 3 blocks from anywhere else on campus. Step competitions devolved into a race for second place between campus police and administration, who switched most meetings to the walking track at said athletics complex.

    Of course, the president of said university was very cool, and he was chill with me beating him at the flip cup portion of a funrun type event.

  38. Anonymouse617*

    College survey center Halloween party. We would compete in games to win coupons that we could trade in for prizes. Our director, who was only a few years out of college himself, decided one challenge would be who could be the first to drink a horrible concoction of milk, soda, prune juice, and I think maybe toothpaste. The resulting beverage was thick, grayish-green, and smelled horrendous. Two contestants tried it, “Amy”, a young freshman girl dressed as Harley Quinn complete with pigtails, and “Fred”, a junior year guy on the club football team dressed as Garth from Wayne’s World. After two sips, Amy immediately ran to the trashcan to throw up. Fred, also ran over to the trashcan to throw up… and proceeded to throw up on Amy’s decorative pigtails as her head was already in the trashcan. Needless to say, the staff Halloween party became A LOT tamer after that.

  39. Irish Teacher.*

    Not mine, but a friend’s workplace did a WEIGHT LOSS contest. People were in groups competing to see which group lost the most. My friend was not overweight and in 20 years of knowing her, I have never known her express any dissatisfaction with her weight (in fact, she recently mentioned she was much thinner when we were younger but she is happier being her current weight; she thinks she was too thin in her 20s) but didn’t want to be left out. She didn’t seem to have any objections about the contest but I found it quite concerned that she mentioned feeling obliged to lose weight she neither wanted nor needed to lose so as not to let her team down.

    I think it was opt in, but I can imagine an overweight person feeling very awkward saying they didn’t want to participate when slimmer people were talking about how they were going to lose weight. And incentivising those who are of a healthy weight or underweight to lose weight is downright dangerous and unhealthy. And that’s not even considering the effect it could have on anybody in the workplace with an eating disorder.

    1. Lab Boss*

      My company once planned one of these (I think it died somewhere between being announced and actually happening) that wasn’t even team based- you had to be publicly weighed each week. I can’t imagine what anyone was thinking.

      1. Bast*

        We also had a “Biggest Loser” contest at an Old Job. People would bulk up wearing layers and layers for the initial weigh in, and would drop layers for the end of the week weigh in to make it seem like they lost a lot. People would refuse to eat before their weekly end of the week weigh in and would end up grouchy and hungry all day — no fun. Despite all these measures, there was only so much people could do to swing the contest their way. I don’t promote this kind of weight loss challenge in the work place at all, but someone who is 100 lbs overweight has the potential to lose a lot more than someone who is already underweight or of an average weight.

        1. Lab Boss*

          Even leaving aside the issues with a workplace weight loss contest, “total pounds lost” can’t be the metric if you want any kind of balance, for sure. Total % body weight lost is better, and total % body fat loss is even better (since it accounts for muscle gain), but *even in an appropriate context* those have flaws- it’s really hard to turn fitness into a contest.

          1. Bast*

            It is! Losing weight can be healthy for some, but it isn’t the be all end all when it comes to being healthy. You can be pretty skinny, but not healthy or fit at all.

    2. HigherEdExpat*

      Ooh we had an optional one of these at work! I ended up on team with members of admin who got very bro-y about winning. I mentioned to one of the organizers that a med I was on had wight gain as a side effect and, well, I learned the hard way that folks who worked in the athletic building aren’t bound by, or care at all about, privacy regulations.

    3. WOOLFAN*

      A former employer had a weight loss challenge (though I believe it was only a component of a larger “health” challenge) when I was pregnant. I believe that when it began I was also early enough in my pregnancy that I had not announced it yet.

      The layers of problematic that come with those kinds of challenges run so freaking deep.

      1. Curious*

        Now, if the contest period started when you were third trimester, and ended after you gave birth, that might be helpful?

    4. Art of the Spiel*

      My brothers did the opposite at deer camp every year, who could gain the most weight. One of them won every year and finally admitted that, unlike the others, *his* daily poop was in the afternoon, so by weighing everyone in the morning of arrival and then again in the afternoon of departure, he’d always have a couple extra pounds on board.

      1. allathian*

        How big were his poops!? Inquiring minds want to know. I’ve never weighed mine, to be sure, but they’re nowhere near that.

    5. Thegs*

      Ah man, my company also had a weight loss contest before we got bought out and became like, 500% more professional (did we have beer on tap in the office as well back then? Why yes we did!) I was functionally ineligible to participate since I was 5’9″, 125 lbs at the time (I’m male so this is borderline underweight) and had no weight to lose, so I don’t know who ended up “winning”. All I remember was half my coworkers being easily irritable and struggling to maintain focus for a whole month due to being hungry and having low blood sugar at all times. I genuinely don’t know how anyone could think these weight loss contests are a good idea.

    6. Random Bystander*

      I remember the weight loss challenges they used to have in my department back when we were in the office. Absolute insanity (it was supposed to be the most pounds lost over a certain number of weeks). They ran this contest pretty much every year and I’m pretty sure that the people who participated were losing and regaining the same 30-40 pounds lost in a 16 week period. Honestly, no one looked much different before/after.

      They’d do the weigh ins and keep track … and then to celebrate the winners and all the lost weight they would have either a) McAlister’s potato bar (catered by McAlister’s–you didn’t have to have participated in the event, just pay $5 for your potato) or b) potluck dessert table.

    7. Gainz*

      I worked at a place that held a weight loss contest. I didn’t have much weight to lose, but thought maybe I could challenge myself to gain some muscle at the gym. But my request to have my (surely tiny) gains as losses was denied. I joined anyways just to spite them, and didn’t gain or lose any weight. Coincidentally, I won a prize in the raffle part of the contest – a scale!

  40. DivergentStitches*

    I was on the “fun” committee and we (poorly) planned a competition where teams of employees would go to a conference room and participate in a trivia game, with bragging rights being the prize. It was supposed to be just a 15 minute break from their day to have fun and laugh with their teammates.

    Unfortunately we didn’t communicate to the team that their time slot in the conference room was a hard one, that Team A had to be there from 10:15 to 10:30 in order to participate, etc. As a result, teams were waiting for Sue to get off of her phone call, or for Barbara to grab a drink, etc. and many of the teams were late to their slots or missed them entirely and showed up much later wanting to still participate.

    There was much dissatisfaction and hard feelings and emails flying around :( Big lesson learned!

    1. Bast*

      I’ve learned in trying to plan anything (from serious meetings to fun events) there is no such thing as a “hard deadline.” There is always at least one person holding things up with “just one more email”, or “I thought I had time to make another coffee” etc.

  41. Lorna*

    Quite a few years ago 4 women in our department decided to have a ” who can run the fastest in a tight skirt and high heels” contest. Winner would get sponsored on a night out, meaning bottomless pints. It.was.on!
    Come Thursday morning in walk 4 gazelles in 6 inch heels and really formfitting pencil skirts. One yelled “GO!” and off they galloped down the middle aisle of our open office cubicle farm.
    Startled by the sound of the stampede Co-workers heads kept popping up from behind the cubicle walls like alarmed meerkats.
    Surprisingly none of the ladies fell or stumbled. The winner was our Business Development Manager, who put “Master of running business in heels & tight spaces” in her Email signature for about a week and got royally drunk the following night out.

    1. Lab Boss*

      I thought this was supposed to be about contests gone awry, not the most successful contest outcome ever. :)

    2. Juicebox Hero*

      Sounds like the admin assistant where I work. She wears at least 5 inch heels and snug short skirts every day, and scoots around like Usain Bolt. Her reward would have to be wine, though, because she doesn’t like beer much.

    3. Lunch Meat*

      “Winner would get sponsored on a night out, meaning bottomless pints.”

      I thought this said “bottomless pants” at first and was about to get very concerned.

    4. Red Reader the Adulting Fairy*

      When I worked for my father, his business partner once was giving me a ribbing about my six inch platform heels (which had 3″ platforms in the front too, so functionally only 3″ heels, or at least that was my explanation at the time) and told me he bet me $20 I couldn’t run ten feet in them. I took off without a word and did a sprinted lap around the back room of the building – and the hard soles of those things ECHOED through the storeroom with every step, CLOP CLOP CLOP – so by the time I got back to him, he was already holding out the $20 bill and my dad was rolling his eyes at both of us.

      1. Lizzay*

        I always called that the ‘net height’ of my platforms.

        I used to wear 3″ heels all the time & now the thought of your story gives me the willies thinking how I would immediately break an ankle.

        1. Red Reader the Adulting Fairy*

          oh, big same. I can probably count on my fingers the number of times I’ve worn anything but crocs and flip-flops since March 2020.

      2. Bitte Meddler*

        In my 20’s, I used to jog 1.5 miles to the train station in 3″-4″ heels every morning for the commute into work. I have no idea why I didn’t wear running shoes and then change in the office like a lot of other commuters.

        When I lived in San Francisco, I would wear those same 3″-4″ heels when walking from the Glen Park BART station all the way up to the topmost street on Mt Davidson. I reasoned that the height of the heel actually meant that my foot was flat instead of on an incline, and therefore it made for an easier trek.

        I am now in my 50’s and have a lot of nerve damage in my feet from thinking it was fine to do all that walking and running in high heels.

  42. Cookies For Breakfast*

    We did a treasure hunt during a rare in-person company event. It had outdoor activities for those who wanted to move and socialise (I don’t love team building in large groups but this was actually great), online puzzles for people who wanted to sit down and code, and a choice to opt out for anyone who wanted to. Still, several people opted in and didn’t turn up. That created large teams who split tasks very efficiently, and teams of one or two people who couldn’t do all the tasks on time.

    At the end of the game, people in smaller teams complained to the organisers that they had a disadvantage, and the final score should be normalised the score based on team size (my workplace is full of math geniuses, though I’m not one, so I’ll take no further questions on the method). The organisers complied. Teams who completed fewer tasks ended up at the top of the league, while larger teams who spent a lot of time doing more activities lost points and didn’t win. Which… isn’t the spirit of a treasure hunt, in my experience. Or maybe I missed a trick in my childhood, when I was that one kid who never ever won a thing?

    1. NotBatman*

      Yeah, that sounds like a mess no matter which way you cut it. As soon as it’s big teams competing against small ones, there simply isn’t a way to make it fair. No amount of math was ever going to leave everyone feeling like the contest went well.

  43. Middle Aged Lady*

    My academic department had a BBQ that we dubbed the “Festival of Southern Culture”
    and had a BBQ sauce contest judged by the department head. One grad student won, and when asked for the recipe confessed that this mother made it for him. We let the prize stand, because what’s more Southern than a guy having his mom do it for him? All in good fun, of course.

  44. sheworkshardforthemoney*

    This wasn’t a contest but a workplace raffle. At one of my early jobs we had a raffle. Most of the prizes were bottles of wine, gadgets etc. You could bring your family and I brought my kid who was the youngest by far at 5 yrs old. One of the prizes was a big bag of candy. She saw it on the display table and fell in love with it. The organizer noted her interest and by some strange fate, her name was the first one called and she won the big bag of candy. To this day she believes it was the luck of the draw.

    1. Shellfish Constable*

      Aw, that’s the opposite of a contest gone awry, it’s so sweet! (Pun unintended but welcome.)

      1. sheworkshardforthemoney*

        I’ve been tempted over the years to ask if she remembers that big bag of caramels.

    4. allathian*

      Not at work, but when I was a young student and my friend group who was a year younger had just graduated high school (we’re in Finland and most people graduate when they’re 18 or 19, we start first grade the year we turn 7, and the legal drinking age in both Finland and Greece is 18) we went on a vacation to Corfu in May. My classes had ended for the year and I didn’t have any exams coming up until June, they had finished their matriculation exams (similar to the leaving cert in Ireland or the baccalaureat in France) and wanted to have a tan on their graduation photos. So off we went to Corfu for a week with a travel agency (we picked Corfu as the destination because my friends and I really liked Gerald Durrell’s My Family and Other Animals and sequels). We were by far the youngest on that trip, and on one bus tour, there was a quiz. I can’t remember the questions more than 30 years later, but the quiz was clearly rigged because my friends and I won a bottle of red wine to share and I’m certain we got at least a few questions wrong. I enjoyed Corfu in the spring, it was summery for us but not so hot that you couldn’t do anything except sit by the pool.

  45. Lab Boss*

    At my summer camp job there was an EXTREMELY unofficial contest among a handful of the teenage staff to see “who can get the biggest bruise by the end of the week.” It went exactly how you’d expect, with the winner having a roughly dinner-plate sized set of bruised ribs.

      1. Lab Boss*

        It started as a discussion of who was ending up with bruises naturally, which would have been fine, but when they made it a contest they started doing it on purpose (because if you put enough teenage boys in one place, of course they will).

    2. Dust Bunny*

      I could have won that. A horse tried to peel me off by rubbing me against a tree. About a third of my inner left leg was bruised.

  46. Lacey*

    A previous employer had a penchant for trying to accomplish company goals with contests.
    Especially if that goal should have been completed by the design or marketing department.

    Need a new logo? A slogan? Promotional photo?
    Let’s do a company wide contest!

    There would always be a prize offered and no one would ever win it.

    Shockingly, having a bunch of unqualified people submit their ideas – and all the qualified people competing against each other instead of working together, didn’t produce anything they wanted to use.

    So, everyone would submit their ideas, there’d be a first round of votes to narrow it down and… no one would ever mention it again.

    Once a bunch of people did ask about it and management awarded a prize at random, but declined to use anyone’s idea.

    I mentioned this pattern to a coworker after we’d both been there about 7 years.
    She’d never noticed!

    1. Lab Boss*

      This seems like it’s very close to the beginning of a good idea. You can’t expect finished design product from random employees, but if you make your contest about the CONCEPT of the logo (or whatever) you can then have a winner with a good idea and pair them with someone from a design team to build it up into a finished product.

    2. Logo Judge*

      Using a different username for this one, since some of my old coworkers could guess my identity from this story. I worked for a City that tried this. They hired a consultant first but didn’t like any of their ideas, and someone had the idea to throw it out to the community for a prize. I was on the committee that judged the logos. They were all terrible. Some were dine as art, but way too complicated as logos. Others were basically WordArt from the 90s version of Microsoft Word. The City procrastinated for a long time on naming a winner, I think they finally named three finalists and gave them the reward but didn’t use any of their logos. Finally, my boss, who had a lot of design clout despite that not being her role, started quietly just changing the colors on the existing colors to darker shades (which made it look a bit more modern) and everyone just followed suit from what I remember. And that became the “new” logo.

  47. Mouse named Anon*

    We had some series of summer events including a 3 legged race, a potato sack race etc. I honestly can’t remember why (as its been nearly 11 years). But I participated and wiped out and hurt my knee pretty bad. It left a fist sized bruise on my knee for weeks.

    1. Just*

      We had something like this that went just as awry for me. It was a pogo stick contest for people who sat at computers all day long and were also pudgy 50+ year-olds. The bosses who came up with the contest were fit, 30-year-olds. I fell and smacked the back of my head on the first try. I saw stars. The big bosses in charge asked if I wanted to go to the ER, but I declined, because I was mortified. I should have gone, of course, if only to show what their dumb idea resulted in. I also had a mild headache for most of the afternoon.

  48. Pangolin*

    There was a most steps competition in my work with different teams competing against each other. One guy was way, way out ahead and when we looked at his profile he said he’d walked 150,000 steps in one day and 120, 000 steps the next. That’s about 100 miles and 80 miles each . Now, I know there are ultramarathoners who might be able to run almost 200 miles in a weekend (a nonstop clip of nearly 4 miles an hour for a solid 48 hours), but he said he had managed to get that many steps by going on a hike with his boy scout troop. After we acted slightly disbelieving but mostly impressed, the numbers went down to something a little more plausible. Our team won more or less on the back of his efforts alone – the rest of us got demoralised pretty quickly. About 2 months later he was investigated for something very serious related to honesty and integrity. He no longer works here. I’m almost glad he was lying, because otherwise I would be seriously concerned about his boy scout forced marches.

  49. The Not-An-Underpants Gnome*

    We had a Jello cook-off at my first call center job, and folks could participate either by cooking or judging, which involved tasting each Jello recipe and voting for one’s favorite.

    I was not the only one who yarfed a rainbow at the end of their shift, but I was probably the only one who did so behind a bus shelter on her walk home and then called her bestie to triumphantly announce she did so without being intoxicated.

    1. A Simple Narwhal*

      Was this a cooking contest involving jello (which from what I know of the 50s or the midwest can result in a wide range of different foods), or just literally bowls of homemade jello?

      1. The Not-An-Underpants Gnome*

        Cooking contest involving Jello, but 1950s recipes were noted as outlawed lol.

        My bestie was impressed. I could hear my mother facepalming over the phone when I told her. My reputation as being the Derpy Adult Child was solidified that day. XD

  50. I don't work in this van*

    We had a weight loss challenge (people were randomly assigned to teams, and the team that lost the most total pounds would win). Someone died in the middle of it, and it was abruptly and decidedly canceled. I don’t think the death was related (or if so, only tangentially), but I guess the optics were bad enough.

    2. Blue Spoon*

      This is actually a relatively positive one, but anytime my workplace is open on a holiday, everyone places “bets” on how many “are you guys open today?” phone calls we’ll get throughout the day. There is no money involved, only bragging rights, but since we track the calls with tally sheets by each phone, it can get a bit contentious if someone thinks that someone else forgot to log a call.

    3. mind bleach please*

      To be really really tacky and inconsiderate-That team probably would have won after losing a whole person’s worth of weight.
      Im sorry.

      1. Burton Guster*

        Now I’m imagining the letter, “My deceased husband’s co-worker showed up at the funeral home demanding to weigh his body, should I call their HR department?”

  51. Juicebox Hero*

    The Find a Fish contest!

    At the store I worked at after college, management held a lot of contests, usually aimed at forcing us to open more store charge accounts. Every once in a while they’d do one in an attempt to boost morale. One such morale booster was placing tiny foam rubber fish with inspirational words written on them, as part of a large number of fish-themed initiatives that must have been making the rounds of management for dunderheads conferences that year. If you found however many fish and turned them in to the office you won a prize. Most of the prizes were cheap junk as usual but some were pretty decent, if you found a lot of fish.

    One night the managers hid a zillion little foam fish all over the store in all kinds of odd nooks and crannies, and sat back and waited for happy workers to squee over their fish-themed tat.

    This store had a team who received softline goods, mostly clothing, and unpacked them, put them on hangers, put on price tags if necessary, that sort of thing, then took them to the clothing departments. They started at 7 am in order to have as much as they could unpacked and ready to sell before the store opened at 10 am.

    Since they were there 3 hours early, they found almost all the fish and nabbed the good prizes before the sales staff got to even look for any. The few people who found any fish at all were stuck with cheap crap like dollar store pencils with fish on them. Besides that, the marking team made a point of gloating about getting all the prizes and taunted people who complained that they’d had an unfair advantage. Management, of course, did nothing to ease the tensions.

    I left that place 16 years ago and still have nightmares about it.

    1. Wolf*

      Reminds me of the stories of pizza parties, where the planner didn’t consider that the 2nd shift wouldn’t think cold leftovers are a morale boost.

  52. Cookies For Breakfast*

    Just thought of another one. Not my experience, but cringy enough that I have to share.

    When I worked in a client-facing job, I dealt with a woman who took pleasure in being absolutely awful to everyone. I used to have a middle school teacher who treated me so terribly that I’d regularly go home crying, and this is is who she reminded me of.

    The one thing she liked (to my knowledge, the only thing she liked) was her workplace. So on one meeting, she went on and on about how her wonderful boss organised great social activities all the time, and how fun their last team building contest had been, because we HAD to understand their fabulous company culture.

    The activity was walking around the city with black rubbish bags full of stuff, stopping strangers on the street, and convincing them to buy one (with real actual money) without telling them what was inside. Some, my client said, had nice items; others were full of random junk bought from £1 stores. The team who sold the most won, and just as the thought “hang on, their team building activity is swindling people” formed into my head, the client added the nail on the coffin: some of the contestants were stopping foreign tourists and children to sell their crap.

    I heard the story some ten years ago, and still second-guess myself: surely it was all innocent fun, there must be a detail I misunderstood. But perhaps I should have mentioned earlier that these beacons of honesty were car salespeople?

    1. Lab Boss*

      We did something similar in college- our safeguards against it seeming like a scam were that we sold the blind bags for a trivial amount (I think $5?), all proceeds went to charity, all bags contained something nominally desirable, and all bags’ contents were worth at least the purchase price. Sure, $5 worth of canned tuna isn’t as good of a prize as a $25 gift card to a local restaurant, but that was the fun of the contest.

  53. jbrandt*

    We had one of those walking contests too, which was cool when I realized I could link it to Strava and it would import my bike rides at a conversion rate of something like 1200 steps per mile. I’d just done a 60-mile ride that weekend, and was riding 10 or 15 miles most days. The scores at the end of the 2-week contest were something like me: 850,000 steps; the next person: 75,000 steps. I won a $100 Amazon gift card and felt a little guilty about it, but not very. They’d set it up that way, after all.

    The next year the other cyclists at the company had figured it out and the top person (who was training for a 200-mile race) had something like 1.5 million steps and there were no actual walkers in the top 10.

    They haven’t done it again since then.

  54. Bingo Card Maker*

    I am not sure the owner would have agreed that it “went wrong” but he came up with a bingo game where with the right combo of numbers called, everyone would hit bingo at the same time. He then gave out all the cards at the holiday party, said he was giving out over $50,000 in prizes. The gimmick was we were all getting a $500 bonus to celebrate a record sales year (this was in the late 90’s so $500 had some weight).

    He was notorious for trivia contests and raffles where he gave away prizes so longtime employees weren’t surprised, but new employees (the company had doubled in size in a year) were a bit taken back by the idea of the owner giving out cash based on bingo.

  55. judyjudyjudy*

    A few years ago my company held its first ever “ugly Christmas sweater” contest. At the annual Christmas party (thankfully during the workday), one of my staff went around campaigning to win ugliest sweater during the luncheon. It was pretty cringey. He won and TOOK A BOW, when he got on stage to receive his $25 prize. So weird!

    1. Jonathan MacKay*

      I remember one year a job did this – the guy that won that one wore a sweater with a mirror attached.

      I believe the reasoning for it was ‘We can take a joke’.

    2. Office Chinchilla*

      My company did an “ugly sweater” contest during our holiday party. They did announce the contest in advance, but you didn’t enter it – the judges just walked around the party we were having in our office and then announced the winners. And they really emphasized, when I won, that it was because I had the UUUUUUUUUUUGGGLIEST sweater. (It was a cat in a Santa hat. I thought it was cute?)

  56. Lorz Bookly*

    Years ago our company used to host an annual ugly sweater contest. Employees were encouraged to wear their silliest, goofiest, ugliest sweaters and outfits. We are a children’s agency so folks would go all out head to toe in goofy clothes. One year, on ugly sweater day, an employee wore their favorite sweater which was met with comments of “that sweater is so silly/ugly/perfect for today” all day. Employee was greatly offended and complained that people were insulting them all day. Admin panic-apologized in a very weird all staff email stating that commenting on anyone’s sweater on ugly sweater day was not in the spirit of the day, no winner was chosen, and ugly sweater day never happened again.

    1. Purple m&m*

      Yeah, that can go so wrong. I was at a holiday party and I ALMOST said to a couple, “Great ugly Christmas sweaters!” But at the last second said,”Great Christmas sweaters.” Good move. They were just festive holiday sweaters.

      1. Lizzay*

        This reminds me of an SNL skit where Aidy Bryan played a newish employee wearing a red suit on the day of the Halloween party, which no one told her about. They kept asking her if she was an apple or a tomato & she said “I’m just a woman who’s trying her hardest”. Which sounds really sad typed out! But her delivery was hilarious.

      2. OpenMouthEnterFoot*

        I actually did tell someone “Great Ugly Christmas Sweater” at a Christmas party with a contest. It was not a part of the contest. Never made that mistake again. :(

  57. essie*

    I may have shared this before, but every year my office has a chili potluck – not a contest, just a potluck. The first year, one of our most difficult managers came into the break room, packed with nearly the whole office. He proceeded to try one spoonful of each chili, and loudly list everything that was “wrong” with it. He would turn and face the room as if everyone was eagerly awaiting his review. I don’t think anyone even said anything, we were just all kinda stunned and confused. It was very obviously not a contest. Also, this manager had not even contributed – he just went around and criticized everyone else’s chili.

  58. NativeFloridian*

    We had a karaoke contest. There were 100 pre-approved songs. One of them was Creep by Radiohead. Two people sang it, and both of them legitimately placed in the top three.

    1. Georgia Carolyn Mason*

      I used to love that song for karaoke, as it’s expected to be kind of mumbly and doesn’t require a ton of range. (And the real singer goes into his head voice on the higher notes, so I don’t feel like it’s cheating if I do.) I can’t remember the last time I did karaoke, probably because I’ve cut back so much on drinking, but I used to alternate that and Hit Me With Your Best Shot because, as mentioned, no range.

  59. CzechMate*

    I work at a university that has a faculty/staff step challenge. When I first started, folks warned me that the step challenge was taken VERY seriously, but I wasn’t anticipating the near mass hysteria that overtakes the professors and admins every Spring, especially when they see how many steps our colleagues on the Grounds Crew and Facilities accumulate per day. A few years ago, one of the physics professor convinced himself that the facilities numbers were physically impossible, prompting him to:

    -Demand an investigation into participants’ steps (one university carpenter said he walked all day and he would also pace at night when he couldn’t sleep, which the physics professor claimed was just incredulous),
    -Jerryrig a rocker that continuously went back and forth, which he strapped his FitBit to (he claimed that this “supplement” was making the competition more fair), and
    -According to the school paper, he began listing 40,000-step days through the contest app and “changed his name to Jaqen H’ghar—an assassin from the popular series Game of Thrones—and entered his height as 9-feet tall.”

    The event organizers, apparently, just decided that the physics professor’s FitBit was defective and gave him a new one.

  60. Art of the Spiel*

    A former employer had a halloween pumpkin carving contest for a few years. Being in auto insurance claims, my department processed titles, sales and payments for vehicles that were total losses. We submitted a smashed pumpkin and a pie, labeled respectively as “Total Loss” and “Salvage.” Didn’t win.
    The following year, we bought a large pumpkin, cut off the bottom and front and hollowed it out. Lined it with plastic, and I put it on my head and made up my face like a scarecrow. Wore a flannel shirt with some hay stuck in the sleeves and some jeans. We won!
    Unbeknownst to me, the same meeting was also where I was receiving an award. So my photo with the great grand-boss regional manager, accepting my prize, had me in full scarecrow costume with a pumpkin on my head. I wouldn’t have it any other way!

  61. Reed Weird (they/them)*

    My first Halloween in post-college office job, they held a costume contest at work. I wasn’t planning to go all out, until I heard my manager telling everyone in the office “I can’t wait to see what Reed does, they were a professional costumer so I just know they’re gonna blow everyone out of the water!” I had worked in the college theater department’s costume shop, and still dress up for Ren Fest and other cosplay adventures. And damn if there weren’t expectations now.

    I showed up for work in full Ren-level pirate garb: lacey (but not low-cut!) blouse, tight-laced corset, pants and boots, with a glorious hat and coat and eyepatch. And when I flipped up the eyepatch, it revealed a white contact (that I could almost perfectly see through) and makeup scars as if I had been blinded by an animal.

    Mind you, the rest of the office wasn’t exactly low-key, one of the owners wore a carhop costume complete with roller skates. But I freaked everyone out but good with the blind eye effect and won that contest in a landslide, and the other owner couldn’t look me in the face when giving me the gift card prize. I’m still at this job, but I don’t go nearly that hardcore anymore!

    1. allathian*

      I bet that manager doesn’t talk you up anymore, either! But yeah, I bet that costume was awesome.

  62. call me wheels*

    I’ve spent the past 4-5 years with a maximum step count of about 1800 steps… above that and I couldn’t get out of bed the next day…. I hope nowhere I work ever does something like that sort of competition >.>
    (Im actually doing better these days after surgery but it would still be terrible for me to try up my step count for no reason every day)

  63. Blue Spoon*

    reposting my earlier comment due to a nesting goof:

    This is actually a relatively positive one, but anytime my workplace is open on a holiday, everyone places “bets” on how many “are you guys open today?” phone calls we’ll get throughout the day. There is no money involved, only bragging rights, but since we track the calls with tally sheets by each phone, it can get a bit contentious if someone thinks that someone else forgot to log a call.

    2. Blarg*

      Oh to be 20. Worked at a rib house that for some reason opened at 10am on Sunday. You know, when everyone wants to eat ribs. We’d all drink a shot for every 15 minutes with no customers. By the time the first table showed up, the whole front of house staff was wasted.

      We were so stupid. Also, it was kinda fun. I also quit drinking entirely as I left that job, before I even turned 21.

    3. WS*

      My workplace also did this, but every time you got a call asking are you open today, you’d get a mini KitKat!

      1. Blue Spoon*

        Oh, I love that! I tried to do something similar at my old job with starbursts, but it didn’t really catch on

  64. Helen*

    We have a “wellness program” that is always doing contests. The steps/walking contest is for the entire year. Our landscapers and housekeepers are always in the lead because their job allows for them to move/walk more often. I suggested that we have 2 contests- one for the workers that have more physical jobs and one for the workers that have desk jobs. I was told that would not happen, that the desk job people would just have to walk at home, after work or on weekends, etc. I felt that was unfair so I put the tracker on my dog. The wellness people are so impressed that I make an effort to “put in the work”. I never win the contest but at least it gets them off my back and I don’t feel guilty about it.

  65. phira*

    Our institute had a music video contest, where each lab was encouraged to make a silly music video about the research being done. The prize was a travel award.

    They ended up needing to extend the deadline for the contest because people were going so far above and beyond what was expected. Our lab in particular went completely overboard. We would spend time in lab meetings arguing over lyrics. Lab members were practicing choreography in the parking lot. One of our post-docs was saddled with editing the video and he got (rightfully) irritated when it took up so much of his time that our PI gently criticized him for being behind on his actual projects.

    We won the travel award. I got to use some of it to go to my first and only conference.

    1. Cedrus Libani*

      We had one of those too, 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.

      1. Charlotte Lucas*

        Please tell me you had They Might Be Giants’ “Minimum Wage” playing softly in the background. (Or would that be too much effort?)

          1. Cedrus Libani*

            This story is actually a good illustration of a failure mode that’s specific to work contests. Everyone involved in this story was a hyper-competitive personality. In situations where I’ve had the bandwidth to do it, I have absolutely gone way too extra on pointless competitions like this. Problem was, at the time the request was made, our team simply didn’t have any craps left to give. We were chasing a “win” that we actually cared about, a difficult project with a fixed deadline, and were already over capacity. We tried to do the thing where you ignore it and hope it goes away, but the organizers made it clear that we would get badgered relentlessly until we gave up and did as volun-told. So we did, but in a manner that made it clear what we thought about it.

    2. Nesprin*

      Oh we won one of those ‘summarize your poster contests’ by making a music video.

      We were working with cardiomyocytes (heart cells) and I jokingly suggested we should rewrite achy breaky heart for the video. Turns out we had multiple musicians in the lab who immediately brought in guitars, a viola and recording equipment, and just enough space in the lab for 12 researchers to do the electric slide.

      We won by a landslide- 3x more votes than the 2nd place winner.

    4. Distracted Procrastinator*

      That sounds like the annual “Dance Your PHD” contest. Which I love dearly and watch as many entries as I can.

  66. Maria*

    This isn’t a “gone wrong” example but an old boss ran a very small pumpkin carving competition for his 3 employees at Halloween one year – supplied the pumpkins, carving kits and candles and gave us the whole afternoon. We had a delightful time carving a transformer, a jack skellington and a very artistic pumpkin while he covered our service himself and then judged.

    Though in fairness, fast forward 6 months later to our mandatory fire marshall training and the head of health and safety asked *why on earth* we not only had candles in the office (in a windowless room) but hadn’t at least hidden them for the head fire marshall’s visit. We explained and he blinked at us and said “so you also had knives and tiny saws and do you know I really do not want to know any more because this sounds lovely and I don’t want to ruin it”

  67. InsufficientlySubordinate*

    Month long contest between teams in a small spin-off department/company. Teams were cross-functional and assigned by mgt. Each team was a different color. It….escalated with the culmination being one of the teams calling a department meeting on a different floor with everyone else invited and one of the team members keeping them busy. They then proceeded to tie ribbons in the other teams colors around disassembled cheap Barbie parts with red nail polish on junctions and hung them from the ceiling all over the place.

    Team contests came to abrupt end. Oddly, management still encouraged the Friday breakfast which also….escalated but with self-selected teams.

  68. RLC*

    In the late 1980s our Government office managers determined that we had too few file cabinets and too many files, so brilliant “solution” idea was hatched, contest between offices to see who could throw away: 1) the most files (by weight); 2) the largest single document (again by weight); and 3) the oldest document (by origination date). In the frenzy of the competition TONS of irreplaceable historic photographs, scientific documentation, you name it, was disposed of. One (!) document apparently was sent to the National Archives, everything else shredded. Boss and I saw the potential for future disaster (this was years before digitization was introduced) and quietly squirreled away what we thought might be needed for future reference, ignoring the contest. Years later as colleagues (unsuccessfully) scrambled to find critical historical documentation for various long term projects I had the perverse pleasure of listening to their lamentations before “magically” making the documents appear.

    1. Charlotte Lucas*

      As the records coordinator for my area at a government agency, I gasped aloud at this contest.

  69. Construction Safety*

    Not my company, but a while back a bar had a contest for the servers & the prize was a Toyota. After busting their azzes for a few weeks, the winner got a Toy Yoda. Lawsuits ensued.

  70. Susan*

    one summer, many years ago, my overwhelmingly male workplace had a golf outing. One poor woman got her foot stuck under the gas pedal of her golf cart, and it dragged her halfway across a green. She wasn’t badly hurt, but was very embarrassed. To make it even worse for her, at the dinner after golf, they gave her an award, for “closest drive to the hole”.

  71. MsMaryMary*

    This happened at my current workplace but long before I started.

    Every year we have a Souper Bowl party the week before the big game. Employees make their favorite soup and bring it in, and votes are tallied for 1st, 2nd, and 3rd prize. We invite clients and vendors and everyone pays $5 admission. Proceeds go to the local food bank.

    One employee brought Brunswick stew. I guess it is not uncommon for Brunswick stew to be made with game meat, but the person who brought it did not tell anyone it was made from squirrel until after the competition (I think he won a prize too, but I’m not sure which).

    The president of our branch was appalled. He is convinced he ate roadkill. Other people were upset as well. The employee who served squirrel was banned from all future office potlucks. The story is revived annually as people make sure that none of the soups are made from rodents and that that the lifetime potluck ban has not been violated.

    1. Bast*

      I don’t think the person should be banned, necessarily, but this highlights one of the many reasons why it is a good idea to list out ingredients on a card whenever there’s a potluck situation going on.

    2. Nightengale*

      I lived in the South for several years. I am a Yankee – they were all very kind when they called me a Yankee because we all knew what other word they could have put in front of it and didn’t. Also I collect cookbooks.

      One day a coworker who was from the south asked if I had a good recipe for Brunswick stew.

      I said I had never had or made it but I knew there was a recipe in my Joy of Cooking at home and I would be happy to e-mail it to her. Did she really want a recipe that contained squirrel?

      She. did not. She had always had or made it with chicken and had no idea squirrel was traditional. But it sure is traditional, at least if you count the Joy of Cooking sitting on this Yankee’s bookshelf as a reliable source.

  72. Take A Dive, johnny*

    Ok, I get it, this is humblebraggy

    I worked at a terrible place with a terrible manager. I’m in sales and his thing was broadcasting everyone’s numbers and pitting us against each other. Very glengarry glen ross of him.

    Well, he had a great idea that after he took an online IQ test and scored 129 that the entire office ought to take the same test and post the scores. Small bonus to whoever scores highest.

    I test well on these things and don’t think it’s proof of anything. I put it off for a week and said I didn’t want to participate. He insisted. Juvenile taunts about me being afraid, and how dumb was I followed.

    Nobody else had topped his score. He sat in my office and made me do it. So I did. I scored a 158. For the rest of my time there he was butt hurt and punitive about it.

    Left about a year later. When I put in my notice he was obviously conflicted, he wanted to talk me into staying, I did numbers, but he couldn’t deny he treated me like crap when his overboss asked.

    Anyway, maybe I should have taken a dive, I don’t know.

  73. BLA*

    I worked for a unicorn start-up where the CEO regularly commanded the stage at our mandatory weekly company all hands meeting. While mostly based in San Francisco, this company also had a large distributed workforce. I can’t remember what inspired him to do this, but in one all hands he announced a surprise: two employees would be selected via a random drawing to fly to SF that night and attend a special in-person event the next day.

    The first employee selected lived in the US. The second lived in India and was overjoyed with their win.

    The CEO had to admit on the spot that it would be logistically impossible (and terribly expensive!) for the Indian employee to fly literally last minute and the wind was promptly taken out of the moment. I can’t believe no one considered the possibility beforehand that an international employee might be selected in the drawing. Maybe that’s why I can’t remember what prompted this drawing; it was all so awkward that I’ve since blocked it out.

    1. CommanderBanana*

      Now that’s the kind of innovative and forward-thinking creativity CEOs are known for and why they make the big bucks!

      /sarcasm

    2. goddessoftransitory*

      That’s right up there with the Simpsons episode where Bart wins and demands an elephant from the local radio station.

  74. Not a Zombie*

    A few companies ago, there was an annual Halloween costume contest broken down by department that was absolutely perfunctory for all employees. I tried abstaining once and got eviscerated by my boss for “not being a team player.”

    One year our team had three different ideas that didn’t work at all together… so of course they were combined into one. And that’s how we ended up with a skit where the group came out dressed as zombies to the tune of Zombie by the Cranberries, and our VP jumped out dressed as Richard Simmons to tell everyone to work on their fitness, followed by an invitation to join us on a heart health walk the following weekend.

    We did not win.

    1. Georgia Carolyn Mason*

      Annoying, but it’s too bad he didn’t go for Zombie Richard Simmons! I did a Zumbie (Zumba Zombie) costume years ago with some friends from Zumba class, which was just shambling around in workout clothes with zombie makeup, which was funny. Although one friend said she hoped women wouldn’t still be expected to stay trim and fit when we were (un)dead, which led to several gross jokes about zombies and their all-protein diet. It’s keto!

    2. allhailtheboi*

      “Zombie by the Cranberries”

      Ah yes, the very Halloween-fun appropriate song about child victims of war.

      (Not a critique of Not a Zombie, just pointing out the song’s meaning to those who don’t know).

      1. Charlotte Lucas*

        It really should have been “Girls Just Want to Have Fun,” which actually is in a Zombie movie. (Night of the Comet – also on my list of unexpected Christmas movies.)

  75. Red Reader the Adulting Fairy*

    Some of our lab people cheated on the (truly 100% optional) steps contest by putting their Fitbits in the centrifuge. It was ridiculous too — they were recording like 80k steps a day, 7 days a week. For comparison, my personal record is 50k steps in one day, and that day I woke up at 2am, went out and did a half marathon, and spent the next 12 hours walking the equivalent of another 12 miles around three Disney parks before collapsing into bed at midnight.

  76. Meep*

    Re: Those stupid steps contest.

    I went to an affluential elementary school that did this. The “star athlete” (in quotes because it was really just his jerk dad hyping him up about how he was going to the NBA – he is a real estate agent now) in my grade always “won” because we used those little pace step trackers that were NOT accurate in the slightest. Him and his brother ALWAYS cheated in the most obvious ways. By that I mean we had a 3rd grader apparently doing 15 km a day at recess but none of us would actually see him walking/running laps with the rest of us. I think the prize for most steps was something absolutely asinine like a bike.

    His mom also made sure that he and his brother always sold the most for those nonsensical Holiday wrapping paper catalogs each year too by like a few thousand dollars. Which I guess was great for the school? Even if we already had an excess of funding? Though, I do remember the top prize for each grade was a $100 bike every year as well. (I have no idea what it was with my school handing out bikes as prizes. Maybe a parent on the PTA loved cycling?)

    Looking back at it now, that try-hard family who needed their elementary-aged students to be the best at everything to the point they were willing to cheat gives me the giggles. Hope they enjoyed their two dozen bikes, though!

    1. essie*

      I knew a family like this! Chocolate fundraiser? They sold the most. Local restaurant fundraiser? They brought the most guests. Costume contest? They had professionally-made outfits. I remember the prizes being so negligible, I couldn’t understand the fervor.
      Unfortunately, I think it usually really wrecks the children, who are completely lost when they don’t win everything in the real world.

      1. Meep*

        Oh definitely. They always ran for class president and I remember one time, one of them lost their grade and their (PTA) mom insisted on a recount. He was so insistent that he would be POTUS one day. (Unfortunately, they were Australian soooo…)

        The youngest is an absolute mess. Like arrested on multiple DUIs and went bankrupt at 25 years old (he became a finance bro). The older one who was in my grade at least seems to be living the picture-perfect life with a nice fancy house and a gorgeous wife with two kids according to Facebook. I hope he is doing well and it isn’t just a façade – even if he was an absolute haughty jerk as a kid.

        Another fun tangent is they lived in my neighborhood and their dad was part of the HOA. He was a stickler for the rules including only one car in the driveway and none on the street at night. (Most houses have 3-car garages.) Really cooked himself when his kids became teenagers, because everyone in the neighborhood was absolutely fed up with him and voted against their best interests just to stick it to him when he proposed that we should be allowed to put TWO cars in the driveway. Like across the board. Only he voted for it to pass.

    2. ScruffyInternHerder*

      I’m trying to figure out what on earth they did with all the bikes.

      My own elementary school frequently had bikes as prizes…because a local family owned a small bike store and they wrote the donation off as charitable on their company taxes.

      1. Meep*

        I have no idea what these boys did with those new bikes every six months. Their dad is also a real estate agent so gave them away with a purchase of a house? lol.

  77. frenchblue*

    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.

  78. NurseThis*

    My last job had a boss who thought mean was funny. He held a Yankee swap around the holidays and the goal was to make as many people cry as possible. Just like The Office, people would get something they really wanted only to have it taken away. Ten years later employees would still be talking about the iPad that was snatched or the jar of mold they got.

    It was semi-mandatory but I begged off and was told I was not a team player, the euphemism for anyone who doesn’t want to humiliate others.

  79. Spy x Office*

    An old department of mine was full of the kind of hyper-competetive nerds who love designing and participating in elaborate contests. The best one was one year’s Secret Santa exachange, which, through a series of increasingly elaborate ‘yes-and’s, became a monthlong competetitive endeavour. The goal was to accrue the most points. You got points by a) correctly guessing who gave each other what present and b) not having your own gift correctly guessed, with bonus points awarded for best gift and best method of gift delivery.

    And if you give a bunch of hyper-competetive nerds who are cooped up in a midwestern office in the dead of winter a competition like this, they will enter into a level of Spy vs. Spy hijinks that you would scarcely believe is possible.

    There were secret codes. There were booby traps. People taped pieces of hair to their doors when they left in the evening so that they would know if someone had snuck in to their office to deliver their gift. People staked out the mailroom. People bribed each other for information about who was seen where when. Stationary was ‘borrowed for authenticity’.

    Eventually it reached its peak when a particularly crafty contestant (let’s call her Anya) successfully forged the signature of the department’s most recent addition, a guy who had only been there a few weeks and didn’t really know what was going on. Anya ended up winning the competition, because nobody guessed that she had given the gift she gave. None of us thought she would stoop so low as to impersonate a confused newbie, and none of us really wanted to contemplate the fact that in our enthusiasm, we had accidentally encouraged our office members to learn how to forge each others’ signatures.

    The next year we stopped awarding points, and the hijinks decreased a little. They never properly went away, though.

  80. Stella70*

    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 co-workers 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 co-worker 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 co-workers were never told of the sad, duplicitous end to our snow pile.

      1. Stella70*

        No, not this time. An intermodal transportation company. Have I ever mentioned that I’ve had more jobs than husbands? (That’s actually saying a lot!)

  81. WorkerJawn*

    At my last job, I signed up for the office March Madness bracket and wound up doing shockingly well – I was winning and had the most in-tact bracket despite not caring about college basketball in the slightest. (Seriously, people kept asking if I picked teams based on colors and I had to inform them I didn’t care enough to look up team colors.)

    The bummer was I had already announced my last day would be a few days before the end of the tournament and the rules said you had to be a current employee the whole time. The guy leading the whole thing kept sending out emails with updates that usually included a ribbing about how I was technically winning but everyone could disregard my results because I wasn’t going to get the trophy. It was a little annoying because of the volume — guy clearly didn’t work the entire tournament — but as a committed trash talker myself, I knew it was in good fun.

    Then suddenly, my very last day, another guy comes out of the woodwork to announce my disqualification was . . . some sort of DEI issue? He sent an email demanding I stay in the tournament and that the current employee rule was biased against people who needed to leave for higher paying jobs, which is disproportionately going to be Black and Brown workers (I am white). I don’t remember much of the ensuing back and forth because my email was being deactivated as it kicked off <3

    1. Ginger Cat Lady*

      More than a decade ago, I was forced to enter our company’s MM bracket. I don’t care for sports much at all, so I filled in my chart on one side with whichever team came in alphabetically first and the other side with whichever team came alphabetically last.
      I won.
      They accused me of cheating, because there was “no way” I could have predicted some of those upsets. And they were right. Hadn’t even *heard* of most of the colleges, so no way I could have known.
      Plus I didn’t understand the complicated scoring system they had.
      I just was being pressured to enter something, so I came up with a way to do it quickly. Enjoyed the prize though!

    2. GoryDetails*

      Ah yes, the March Madness brackets! I wasn’t forced into mine so I don’t know that it counts for this, but the first time I saw an in-office March Madness contest I won it – by choosing (a) teams from states I’d ever lived in, (b) teams from states any of my relatives had ever lived in, and (c) teams with mascots of animals I especially liked. [Given that I worked at a software development company, the office wasn’t exactly loaded with serious basketball fans, but some of the guys who WERE serious fans – and the engineers who went all-in on the statistics and odds – were a wee bit miffed to lose to such a random method as mine.]

      As is, I believe, traditional for this kind of thing, I never won another March Madness. Something about newbie-vibes, I guess!

  82. Sheesh*

    Maybe not exactly what you’re looking for, but at one place I worked eons ago, upper management would hold poker nights for select invitees (men only) where they would vote to rank the office women by hotness. They thought this was a great contest, and I learned about it when one of the players asked me if I wanted to know my ranking. I of course said no, but this was back before you could safely signal sexism (and how do you do that when the president, VPs, and other higher ups created the game in the first place?). And what did the winner even get? She become a target at the next office party.

    I’m glad there are better systems for reporting this now.

    2. Bitte Meddler*

      Ah, yes, flashbacks to 1989 and the owners of a tech consulting company telling me I was lucky they hired me because I’d failed their “elbow test”.

      When I, of course, looked confused, one of the owners put his hands over his ears which made his elbows point out in front of him. He said, “Your boobs don’t stick out at least as far as the tips of your elbows.”

      All I could was laugh. I needed the paycheck.

  83. Sola Lingua Bona Lingua Mortua Est*

    A previous employer had an “Accuracy” contest among the programmers and QA staff where the programmer who had the fewest errors and the QA editor who found the most over a 2-week period each won a basket of gift cards (something like $100-125) and adult beverages (I think one had two bottles of wine, the other a twelve-pack of industrial beer).

    The winning QA editrix “accidentally” took both keys to the cabinet that held the queue with her to lunch each day and home each evening. Because this slowed down the QA work to only when she was in the office, the team was behind when the weekend came and she volunteered for the on call/weekend work.

    The winning programmer scheduled a week of PTO, volunteered for the late shift when he returned, and swapped tickets with other programmers until nothing he had left was due before the contest ended. His score was zero because he completed no work during the contest.

    The effect on morale is exactly what you’re imagining.

    1. Lizzay*

      Ugh, my old workplace instituted contest where the top 3 or 5 people with the most billable hours for the quarter got something – $500 or $1000 or maybe more – not and insubstantial amount! This contest was implemented halfway through the fourth quarter of a year where I had been working myself to death, and had already allowed myself to say no to a few projects so I could actual work a few normal 40-hour weeks before the end of the year & take some badly needed time off. I went back & looked (they sent monthly reports with everyone’s hours summed up, so it wasn’t hard) & I would have been in the money for the first 3 quarters of the year, but since this contest started in Q4, so sorry, toots.

      Later turned out some junior staff were hogging a lot of work instead of spreading it around, and doing it pretty crappily. When the only metric is how many hours you bill & not the quality of the work, gee, well, you get what you ask for. I wouldn’t call it *malicious* compliance, but certainly letter of the law, not the spirit.

    2. shedubba*

      This reminds me of the graduating class just before mine in high school. Valedictorian was determined by highest GPA, and salutatorian second highest GPA, but any class designated as Honors would give you 5 GPA points for an A instead of 4, 4 for B, etc., meaning that valedictorians tended to be good students that took lots of Honors classes and did well in them, and frequently were orchestra students, since Honors Orchestra was one of the few Honors classes available to freshmen.

      The football coach’s daughter graduated the year before me, and while she wasn’t a bad student, no one was thinking about her for valedictorian. At the beginning of her senior year, it came out that at some point she’d started taking all of her non-Honors classes as pass/fail, meaning they wouldn’t count towards her GPA, and she was on track to be valedictorian. There was outrage from the more academic types who’d thought they had a chance, but only one other person stooped to her level and took all of her remaining non-Honors classes pass/fail too. She ended up as valedictorian, the football coach’s daughter was salutatorian, and the guy in 3rd place, who had a 36 on his ACT and went to University of Chicago, is probably still salty about the whole thing.

      1. Charlotte Lucas*

        This is probably why my high school didn’t allow pass/fail. (I am still salty that the difference in GPA between an honors and non-honors class when I went was miniscule. They changed it my senior year, but it still wasn’t a 5-point system.)

        1. Cedrus Libani*

          My high school didn’t allow pass/fail either, but apparently there was a loophole – summer school allowed it. The valedictorian of my year figured this out, then somehow managed to take PE the summer before sophomore year, so she had an open spot in her schedule for one more honors course than the rest of us could take. She told no one, and nobody noticed until the class standings came out senior year. I had gotten the scarlet B+ on my transcript at some point, so I wasn’t among the mob of straight A and “maximum” Honors kids who were grumpy about being tied for salutatorian instead of valedictorian as they expected; I had the liberty to just be impressed by her commitment to the bit.

  84. Not a Haunted Doll*

    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.

  85. GingerNinja*

    One office I worked at in the 2000s was VERY into Halloween – we dressed up, decorated, brought kids in to trick-or-treat at desks … All The Things. The highlight was bringing in the food. There were prizes for Most Creative, Grossest, Scariest, Best Tasting and so forth. One year, the main sales guy (married, four kids) came rushing in late with a box of Krispy Kreme doughnuts for the table. Said he just hadn’t had time to actually make something and his wife was too busy. We ragged on him all morning about being a slacker, not setting a good example for his team, blah, blah, blah.

    Well. After the judging, it was time for the eating. The first person to take a big ol’ bite out of the doughnuts (all custard-, jelly- or kreme-filled) SCREAMED, dropped the doughnut, was frantically wiping at her mouth and spitting into a napkin. Mild panic and confusion abounded. Sales guy is doubled over with laughter in the corner.

    Turned out, he had cut the plastic spiders off rings, painstakingly stuffed the spiders INTO each of the filled doughnuts so people would bite into them. Needless to say, he got all the awards and major prank bragging rights!

    2. allathian*

      Yikes. How many donuts got thrown in his face?

      I hate pranks of any kind, and this one is borderline malicious. How big were the spiders? Could someone have swallowed one by mistake? Or choked on it?

  86. Embarrassed to still be thinking about this*

    This one is kind of telling on myself for taking a work contest too seriously. I think I make a mean chili and am proud of it. So when a chili cookoff was announced at work, I was excited to sign up. I make my signature chili, think it tastes great and get ready to collect another win. I’ve won cookoffs with friends before, so my ego was not totally misplaced.

    Apparently the organizers neglected to get judges for this competition and didn’t want to do a popular vote. Instead they end up grabbing random people walking by. It turns out, one of them does not like spice. Not good for my on the spicy side chili. I end up coming in third because the vote was split with two of the judges ranking me first, but the non-spice loving judge did not have me in the top three at all. I’m still a little salty about losing because my chili was “too spicy” for this person. How do you agree to judge a food competition when you don’t like one of the fundamental components of the dish?!

    1. No Tribble At All*

      Because the person who is grabbing you and saying “You’ll judge the GrillMaster competition, right! Everyone loves ribs!!” is scarily enthusiastic. Source: worked from home that day because I don’t like ribs and was also four months pregnant and didn’t want to eat my coworker’s food that had been marinating out all day (:

    2. Lizzay*

      I won a (popular vote) chili contest once I think mainly because I put the Tabasco on the side for as much or as little heat as you wanted!

    3. I Have RBF*

      I once lost a chocolate chip cookie making contest because they said my chocolate chocolate chip cookies had “too much chocolate”. I don’t believe such a thing is possible. It’s been nearly 40 years and I’m still salty about that.

      1. Bast*

        Yeah, I’ve competed in several fair baking competitions, and unfortunately some of the comments left on the cards show that people scored based on completely subjective criteria that would be impossible for a contestant to know. Flavor, appearance, texture, etc., are all normal things, but “I hate raisins” and the like should not be one. I am not a fan of oatmeal raisin, but if I were a judge in a contest I certainly wouldn’t mark the cookie down because it isn’t my favorite — it should come down to the technical aspects, but sometimes it just doesn’t.

        …However, I am still lost on how a chocolate chip cookie can have TOO MANY chocolate chips. If you gave me what you called a chocolate chip cookie and it had no chips in it, that would be a strike, but too many? Not a thing.

  87. A Slightly Damp Alpaca*

    This is not so much a contest as it is a story of a raffle and corruption.

    At a former job in a food processing facility, HR decided to raffle off a big screen TV. The HR “departement” consisted of the HR Director and her assistant. They wanted people to turn in Safety Concerns and then after a certain time (one month? I don’t remember) they would draw one out of the box and that person won the TV. The TV was on display in the Assistant’s office and you were supposed to fill out your safety concerns and put them in a box on the Assistant’s desk. They did not vet the safety concerns so you could write anything and you could enter as often as you liked.
    Guess who was not ineligible? The HR Assistant. Guess who had all day to sit at their desk and stuff the box with bogus safety concerns? The HR Assistant. The drawing was in private and the winner was posted in the employee newsletter. Guess who won the TV? The HR Assistant. Oh, the topping on the cake was that they published the “winning” safety concern in the employee newsletter as well: “I’m concerned that the carpet in the offices has too thick of a ply and might cause someone to stumble”.

  88. I'm so old I'm historic*

    Our work had a chili cook off contest and it was awful. No one listed the ingredients so a coworker went home sick because he is allergic to cocoa powder (who knew that was a thing for chili?). Another spilt his crockpot in his car and made his girlfriend come in with the small bowl of leftovers they were saving for dinner, and the crowning moment was when we discovered roaches crawling out of one of the crockpots. When we told her what happened, her response was, “oh I thought I got them all.” This is also one of the reasons our company had our holiday dinner switched from potluck to catered.

    4. allathian*

      Yikes! I’m no longer particularly comfortable eating food cooked by people whose standards of kitchen hygiene may be less stringent than mine. I’m glad potlucks aren’t a thing at my job.

  89. Carole from Accounts*

    I worked at a startup with a lot of trivia buffs and we often had get-togethers over Trivial Pursuit. As a team building event, HR said we could have a Jeopardy event in which one coworker prepared the board and anyone who wanted to participate could log onto a website with their phone and use a code to get a virtual buzzer, so it would function much the same as the show, just with a lot more contestants. When 30 people showed up, we decided to organize into teams of 5-6 people, gather around one phone per team, and play that way.

    Unbeknownst to anyone that day, one of the participants had actually been on Jeopardy and was so INCENSED that she didn’t win a casual game of unlicensed Jeopardy that she started trash talking the host to everyone who would listen. Luckily the host was pretty well loved, and the game was clearly not biased, so this went nowhere. Then the coworker took this to HR as a complaint, which also went nowhere. It was an after hours event, there was no prize, it was just for fun and HR announced it so people could decide if they wanted to participate!

    For MONTHS, this employee just kept complaining about the event, and making increasingly insane accusations. They were eventually laid off for unrelated reasons months later, but after they left the frequency of trivia events really increased, much to everyone’s delight.

  90. dorothy zbornak*

    Years ago and many jobs ago, we did a Biggest Loser contest to see who could lost the most weight. This is already SO problematic but we ended up figuring out that the coworker who was was already bulimic and this just made it worse. She had to go to outpatient rehab.

    2. Dancing Otter*

      I hope the company paid for her rehab, since it was a company activity that caused her to need it.

  91. Nameless*

    This is actually my husband’s story:
    A few jobs ago, he and a co-worker got into a (playful) debate about who could eat more McDonald’s cheeseburgers in one sitting. His boss overheard & decided that they’d have a contest between the two of them. His co-worker (the larger of the two of them) talked an extremely big game and declared he could eat 20 – my husband came in at a much more modest 8 to 10. Ultimately, they both ate 9 in the alloted time and as a tie breaker, had to take a bite of a 10th burger and the bigger bite won. My husband lost by the weight of about two quarters (their engineering lab meant they could weigh the burgers with extreme precision.) Afterward, the company had a happy hour for the rest of the staff – my husband went and took a nap in his car. The kicker is that the reward for participating was that they each won a gift certificate… to McDonald’s. It was months before we used it, because my husband couldn’t even stand the smell of Mickey D’s for a while.

  92. Will I Am*

    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 in the contest (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 revoting; 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.

  93. Oats*

    15ish years ago two work friends and I were all up for Associate of the Year at the giant retailer we worked for. You were considered if you had been Associate of the Month during the previous year, which was supposed to be awarded by management based on performance, but for Assc. of the Year it was voted on by your fellow coworkers and was essentially a popularity contest.
    My friends and I decided that we were going to each “campaign” for ourselves: we made spoofs of Obama’s “Hope” poster with our individual pictures and department names and put it on shirts (we each wore someone else’s face) , we handed out flyers at the morning meetings, and generally made donkeys of ourselves. *We* had a lot of fun, and management was fine with it…but apparently one of the other nominees was upset and made a big enough deal that we had to stop our campaigns.
    None of us won (not even the person who complained) but I still have the campaign shirt with my friend’s face on it.

  94. Unkempt Flatware*

    My favorite memory was of the principal of the elementary school I taught in years ago. She was obsessed with winning district contests which were mostly focused on weight and eating and exercise. She would send her minions around to pressure you to fill out the forms and participate in the contest. We would do what we needed to do to keep the minions away. We would win every contest but when it came time to show up to the School Board meeting to accept the trophies, no one would show up but the principal. She looked like an idiot grinning in all those pictures with the same school board members each month. Then she’d get upset at us for not showing up for her.

  95. Anonymous sales drone*

    If any of my coworkers are on AAM they will recognize this event. My site hosted the annual meeting for the global team sales for the first time in a decade. The competitive team building event was ice carving. Yes, ice carving. Plastic sheeting was spread on the floor, and we were divided into teams, given a hundred pound block of ice, carving tools and told to have at it. Ice carving is difficult, the tools are sharp, and shaved off chunks of ice tend to melt when you carve ice INDOORS. Halfway through the allotted time for the contest we were informed the melting ice was leaking through the plastic sheeting, onto the technical equipment on the floor below us, which happened to be engineering. The CTO was not amused. Fun times!

      1. Anonymous sales drone*

        There was a local ice carving company that was trying to turn “carve a slab of ice” into a team building/party event. I think our event proved to them it was not something that was easily done anywhere except in their warehouse.

  96. Didi*

    I worked in sales at a marketing agency where the creatives (writers, artists etc) would do stunts and contests sometimes, supposedly to get the creative juices flowing.

    Once they had a “six word epitaph” contest around Halloween, where they wrote their life story in six words. Like if you had space in your tombstone for six words besides the usual name and dates, what would you say?

    They wrote their epitaphs anonymously on paper tombstones and hung them in a hallway. Everyone was invited to vote on their favorite.

    What a fascinating and morbid look into these people’s lives! There were epitaphs about wasted potential, crushed dreams, failed marriages, shame about their day jobs, half-finished novels in desk drawers …. oy.

    A partner saw the display and ordered a secretary to take it down. Never heard who the winner was or what the prize was, but I think everyone kept their jobs.

  97. NobodyHasTimeForThis*

    The steps contest reminds me of one I participated in briefly. The contest was trying to cover all bases for “healthy weight loss and fitness”
    You got a point per minute of cardio or weight training
    You got a point per pound of weight loss
    You got a point per day of “healthy eating” with a lot of arguments on what could constitute healthy eating and they finally settled on an extremely strict eating disorder triggering limit.
    And the kicker – this was at the height of the “core is king” trend, you got a separate point per rep of abdominal exercise.

    The first month I did my 5 minute ab video each day. At 300 reps apiece.
    Plus I was marathon training at the time and doing cross training.

    I bailed on the weight loss and healthy eating but turned in nearly quadruple the number of points of anyone else.

    The second month I opted out.

  98. H.C.*

    Maybe only semi-bonkers, but as part of ExJob’s workplace wellness week our HR held a salsa contest to encourage healthy eating; it was only supposed to be pretty straightforward with gift card prizes for 1st to 3rd place winners, but it devolved into employees nitpicking at every component of the contest criteria (red salsas can’t be judged alongside green salsa; chunky ones can’t be judged alongside smooth ones; is there a Scoville minimum/maximum? how “from scratch” does the preparation have to be? are judges representative of [Latin American region] so they know how the salsa is supposed to be like?), as well as folks who only read the “salsa contest” subject line and replied asking about the non-existent dance competition (incl one heated accusation of ableism).

    I think it eventually turned into 5-6 salsa judging categories that year (so yes, from three prizes to 15-18), and I think that was the first/last/only time we had that contest before I left that workplace.

  99. CityWorker*

    When I worked for a city government, I served a stint on the Employee Advisory Committee (we hosted parties, fundraisers, blood drives, charity runs, seasonal “events” like a pumpkin carving contest, etc for employees, as a means of keeping everyone slightly happier, I guess). Anyways 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 had 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 5th 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.

    1. Rainy*

      I just read this to my husband and he reminded me of the time my office did a game show thing with some TPIR style games involving the prices of like, snacks and stuff. They were just BSing the prices, and I told the person organizing the games that if she kept BSing it was going to lead to problems, and she pooh-poohed me and said “Oh, Rainy, it’s just for fun, no one takes it that seriously!” I was like “For the love of god, please just go to the grocery store and write down how much stuff costs! This is going to turn into an absolute gong show!” Everyone knew better than me, though.

      Then on the day, it quickly became clear that the prices, while in the ball park, were not precise. ABSOLUTE PANDEMONIUM. Parents were driving to the store and taking photos of prices so they could angrily email our office. A woman called the provost’s office to complain that the games were rigged and her daughter had been robbed…of a tee shirt. Sigh.

  100. Workerbee*

    We had a door decorating contest during a holiday season. HR used a free online platform to create a survey for voting – several people quickly realized they could cast multiple votes, and spent the rest of the day working on figuring out how to cast as many votes as possible. My office was just around the corner from our HR director, who literally cried when she demanded that IT investigate the “voter fraud” – and then she went through the halls tearing down door decorations. It was the most wonderful time of the year.

  101. Blarg*

    About 15 years ago, I did my SCUBA training in Roatan, Honduras, which has a bunch of friendly but competitive dive shops staffed by young people who spend a few months doing dive master or instructor training.

    While I was there, the shops held the Dive Master Olympics at some guy’s pool, raising money for a local charity. Fights with pool noodles. Swimming races. Beer chugging. And “how many laps can you swim without coming for air.” One guy was going strong til he got disoriented, lost consciousness, and sank to the bottom.

    Fortunately, there were like 40 or 50 people there trained to handle this. Couple guys jumped in and grabbed him. He came to at the surface. He laughed it off and resumed drinking beer (not recommended). And the DM Olympics resumed.

  102. Knighthope*

    In the 1980s, to “save energy dollars,” my mid-Atlantic USA 150 school system set up a contest to reward schools that saved the most energy. Legitimate claims of unfairness, and chaos ensued. Some buildings were 75 years old, drafty and energy inefficient. Others were state of the art and well-insulated. Some were air-conditioned. Should we stop using overhead projectors? Or electric typewriters? Start handwashing the phys ed towels? Rely on sunlight? Teachers are great at what-ifs and asking questions. The contest quietly disappeared in a flash!

  103. Sammy Claws*

    Right after the TV series “Biggest Loser” became a hit, the company president had the brilliant idea to create a biggest loser contest at our workplace. To make the idea worse, he decided it would be done in teams. He chose his son as his partner, and both of them just went WILD with weight loss strategies.

    As the result of the competition, the other contestants (including myself, because I felt completely obligated to do this) started working out a lot in the company gym on lunches and after/before work.

    One fine day, I was “talked to” by my boss for taking too long of a lunch because of the workouts. I ended up losing my mind on her because I am an early-in, late-out employee who always goes above and beyond at work, and I was PARTICIPATING IN SOMETHING CREATED BY THE LEADER OF THE COMPANY THAT I FELT OBLIGATED TO DO. So I stopped working out at lunch. My partner in the contest happened to be engaged to the president’s son and she got PISSED and started a family fight over it, which culminated in me being called into the president’s office for a “talking to” about my misunderstanding (there was none). When I pushed back, I got a lecture about my attitude.

    This place was a shit show and I quit soon after, but not before these two doofuses won the stupid contest they created.

  104. Sarah M*

    Mine doesn’t have an amusing end to it, more of a “this was super dumb, and we were lucky no customers sued the store”.

    I worked for a high-end retail store in college as a cashier, affiliated with a major fashion designer. The store constantly had incentives for the sales staff which could earn them extra $$$. The Head Cashier/Supervisor (kindly) wanted to give us a similar chance to earn some extra money, too. Unfortunately, her idea – which the PWTB foolishly approved – was that we could earn a small bonus by *not accepting customer returns*. I don’t mean returns of years-old, destroyed merchandise past the return date. I mean ALL returns, including those in compliance with the store’s 30-day return policy. Which was printed at the bottom of Every Single Receipt given to customers when they bought something.

    The only good thing I can say about it as a cashier, is that returns had to be punched in by a Manager. So at least the people who created the bone-headed policy got to deal with the direct fallout from customers. For once. How the store didn’t get into any legal scraps with the people it stiffed, I’ll never know. That was an interesting month.

  105. teals*

    I used to work in a library, and one year, HR organized a very casual, low-stakes staff raffle. You received one entry for every book you read. The prize was standard, like a $25 gift card. One of my coworkers, Susan, took this raffle *very* seriously. She read on her breaks, during her lunch, and whenever she had a free minute. She was logging books constantly. She told us that she was listening to audiobooks at home, on fast playback speeds. Someone questioned if audiobooks counted, and she went ballistic (to be fair, it was pretty clear that audiobooks qualified, but her reaction was wild). Susan was absolutely positive she was going to win the raffle, just by the sheer odds she’d created.
    Finally, the organizer drew the winner at a quarterly all-staff meeting. Susan was super excited, eagerly staring as the organizer pulled a winner. And… Susan did not win. A new-ish clerk won instead, and as she trotted up to get her prize, she exclaimed “What a surprise! I only read like, one book!”
    Susan turned literal red. If I was ever going to witness steam come out of someone’s ears, it would have been Susan. She death-stared at the winner. She angrily sulked in her seat for a few minutes before abruptly leaving the room.
    The next year, someone casually asked if we’d be doing the raffle again. From across the office, Susan declared “NO, we will not be. Raffles are gambling and have no place in a library. I educated HR about this last year and they will no longer organize raffles. BUT they will be holding a reading CONTEST, where the person who reads the MOST will be the WINNER.”
    I don’t think I’ve ever seen someone get so upset over a $25 gift card.

    1. allathian*

      I doubt it’s the prize. Some people are simply competitive to an, IMO, unhealthy degree, and spoil the fun for all of those who’d otherwise enjoy simply taking part in a raffle for a chance at winning.

    2. Scarlet ribbons in her hair*

      I’m wondering how HR determined how many books each employee read. If someone said, “I read five books each day” would HR say okey-dokey? What was to keep people (including Susan) from lying about the number of books they read?

  106. Name Anxiety*

    At one job, our not super competent HR allowed a staff member at one location to organize a weight loss/more active lifestyle “wellness” challenge. She apparently had some relevant experience, but I’m not sure what it was that qualified her to do this. She really went all in and coordinated weigh-ins for staff that participated and was tabulating their activity logs, etc. We had locations all over the county, and staff were using work time to travel to a central spot for weigh-ins each week. The staff member who was organizing it was also apparently using all her work hours (we were non-exempt) on this. Once HR realized that everyone thought this could be done on work time due to the way they worded the contest announcement, they made a big deal out of saying that none of this could be done on work time or you would be disciplined, so everyone quit and the contest was cancelled and they never did another “wellness” challenge as long as I worked there.

  107. Correlation is not causation*

    I worked at a school where they decided to do a step contest where each department competed head to head with another department.
    The front office department (computer users) were pitted against the activities team (Gym classes, after school activities, etc). There were three of us in the office, and 19 people in the activities department. We were competing about who had the most steps after a week. Not by person – but TOTAL.
    The front office was lucky to get 4000 steps during work, the activities team was getting 20,000+ per day.
    The front office team was made up of middle-aged ladies
    The activities team were all people in their 20s who liked to hike after work.

    It was all in good fun, until the director told the office team that if we lost we would have to come up with $100 gift card PER PERSON for the other team. Quitting was not an option.

    After they won, the director told them we would give each of them a $100 gift card because of our poor performance. The winning team laughed and said that was ridiculous and stupid and they didn’t want money, they thought it was just for fun, and if by some miracle we had won they wouldn’t give us gift cards.

    The director brought this up at every single team meeting until the day he retired. It was always in his opening statements ‘how are you guys doing with getting those gift cards – they really earned them, they won by a LOT’.

    1. allathian*

      I’m glad the winning team in this totally unfair setup were good sports about it.

      The director sounds like a really pleasant person. /s

  108. NoMoreSugar*

    My company decided to have a bake-off, so I agreed to be a judge. There were over 25 entries. It was then I realized the error in agreeing to be a judge. I had to taste and score them all. People were concerned for the health of the judges because the organizer really wanted us to have a full serving of each. Delicious, but painful. We haven’t done one since….

  109. ICodeForFood*

    Many years ago, my late husband’s employer had a cubicle decorating contest for Christmas/Chanukah/Winter holidays. My husband had just had toe surgery, and was clomping around in one of those boots… so I made cubicle decorations for him on the theme of “It’s time for ‘missile-toe’ and holly.” Paper toes with rocket fins to hang from the ceiling, holly gift wrap with ‘missile-toes’ drawn on it for his desk. It’s hard to describe, but it was weird… which is an OK reputation when you work in a technical field.

  110. MuchoMacho FiveEighths Full*

    I entered a guacamole contest hosted by an employee resource group at my workplace. The contest took place on the Monday after Cinco de Mayo and when I shopped the night before, my grocery store was totally wiped out of fresh limes and the other necessary ingredients were pretty slim pickings. What I made certainly fell short of my usual guacamole, but I took it to work the next day. When it came time to judge, the first place guacamole turned out to have been made by a member of the resource group, so they were ineligible to win the prize–a Whole Foods gift card. They moved down the list–the second, third, fourth and fifth place guacamoles were also made my resource group members. My sixth place guacamole (out of maybe 9 total entries?) was the highest ranked dip eligible for the gift card, so I won? I hardly felt like I deserved it, so I mailed the gift card to my sister, who adores a gift card, with a letter telling her the story, and she was very pleased!

  111. Kivrin*

    This isn’t so “terribly gone wrong” but just another example of workplace fitness schemes that shoot themselves in the foot.

    I work for a one of the academic streams in a large teaching hospital. There are about 100 people in our portfolio, spread across sites and departments, so our VP decided it would be great for us to have a little movement contest in teams to get to know each other better/ build our Portfolio Spirit.

    They had considered all of the usual issues with fitness competitions — it was simply focused on self-defined movement, wasn’t at all tied to weight, could be swimming, wheelchair basketball, walking, desk yoga, triathlons – whatever you considered movement. We were just supposed to log the minutes of working out as a team.

    Well, I move a LOT and I’m very motivated by collecting points (ADHD dopamine hits FTW). So I doubled down on my movement for the first two weeks. There was also a guy training for a triathlon on my team. So in our first check in, our team was beating all the other teams by a threefold factor.

    Well, I felt smug and proud — but then our VP decided that this was manifestly unfair and shook up the teams so that I was moved to the team with the fewest points, and triathlon guy was on the second lowest team.

    Then my underperforming team pulled ahead, and they shook us up AGAIN.

    So my competitive spirit made me very very sulky and then I was just MAD at everyone. But then of course we WON anyway.

    So we won something like $300 and being a bunch of middle class privileged people working in a hospital that serves marginalized populations, we wanted to donate the $300 to one of the hospital outreach programs. But they wouldn’t let us do that, because it was earmarked for “wellness” and we were supposed to spend it on ourselves. We wrangled around and then the prize money ended up being unclaimed.

    So let’s recap: this wellness focused teambuilding effort ended up with me doing what I always do, getting irritated by the leaders who kept disregarding the accomplishment of my moving, and then the team feeling completely disgruntled that we didn’t get to spend the money on the thing that would have actually made us feel good.

    On the plus side, I now have a buddy who was on my final team who reminds me that this how we met every time we find ourselves in the same meeting. So I guess we bonded?

  112. ChiTownSalaryman*

    We had a beach day for my Chicago-based company. The intention was to go play games on the beach and do some team building.

    It was the hottest day of that entire year, at 2 PM. There were 30-40 of us. There was no shade except a pop up runner’s tent that could accommodate about 8 people comfortably. No one reserved the volleyball courts next to us, so we couldn’t play the actual games. Very few people were comfortable being in beach wear around their coworkers, so the attire ranged from business casual to t-shirt and shorts to swim trunks. It was one guy’s first day and so he was told he had to Uber to the beach in a suit after setting down his things. At one point the frazzled receptionist that was tasked with organizing ran into Lake Michigan in her dress, saying “I’ll be damned if this crowd sees me in a bikini but it is just so hot outside.” A quarter of the group broke away immediately and got blackout drunk at the beach bar.

    The person who originally suggested the idea was on PTO that day, missed the whole craziness, and when we had our next all-department meeting he was recognized for his efforts to improve our culture. He visibly didn’t want to get up and be recognized and literally had to deal with angry coworkers scowling at him for the rest of the month.

  113. Mermaid of the Lunacy*

    We had a company fundraiser where the reward for hitting the goal was seeing co-workers sing karaoke. The songs were pre-decided, but clearly no one had screened the lyrics to “I’ve Had the Time of My Life” because when the two men dueting it got to the part that goes, “With my body and soul, I want you more than you’ll ever know…I know what’s on your mind when you say ‘Stay with me tonight’” they both erupted into uncomfortable giggles and turned bright red. We are a proper, straight-laced company so nobody knew if we were allowed to laugh or what to think. The organizers of the karaoke got a talking-to and that particular “reward” was never done again!

  114. HailRobonia*

    In my old job in a university department I had to run a HUGE holiday party that involved a raffle for various prizes donated by local businesses (things such as a free night at a local hotel, university-branded clothing, gift certificates. We invited all departmental faculty, postdocs, graduate students, and staff, as well as their family members.

    I was not thrilled about the raffle… it wasn’t my decision and I said it would be a bad idea because we were already stretched thin (it was, on paper, four of us running an event for 500+ people but in practice it was me and one other coworker… the others flaked out). I raised the issue MANY times that we should restrict the raffle to official department members only. I didn’t want someone to get two chances to win something just because they brought a +1…. or in one specific case an employee who would bring her entire family including her siblings and all their many children.

    I told the volunteers at the check-in table to check IDs and only give tickets to actual departmental members. And in all the announcements about the event I tried to be quite clear about the policy.

    Well, surprise surprise nobody followed my instructions and wouldn’t you know it, the person who brought her huge family ended up winning multiple prizes… she won one, so did her 5-year-old daughter…. and so did her husband (who worked in an entirely different department).

    This caused an uproar when people rightfully pointed out this was unfair and against the policies…. the daughter was in tears, the employee screamed that everyone was ganging up on her, I tried to reiterate the policies calmly and clearly…. it was awful all around. A classic case of “this is why we can’t have nice things.”

  115. mayflower*

    I temped after college before finding a permanent role, and I was at one place for 8ish months. They were a sports association…something. To be honest, I really don’t know what most of them did; I was there to help plan their annual conference. But because of the sports thing, there was (among others) an annual planking contest where whoever could plank the longest won. Like eight weeks before the contest a couple people decided to train for it during lunch, and that eventually grew to tons of employees and became a thing where people were also informally competing to have the best attendance at these training sessions. During lunch the entire middle of the office was taken up by people planking on the floor and the crowd of spectators. I can distinctly remember wondering whether this was what all offices were like.

  116. Allen*

    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.

  117. avocadolime*

    Approximately 2 days before a state-wide fundraising event for non-profits, our Executive Director had an all-staff meeting to announce we’d each be responsible for fundraising in teams with board members. All staff members would participate, even though most were not involved in development. In a follow-up email the ED, clearly trying to hype people up, said the staff member who raised the most money would win a $100 Amazon gift card. The email also stated, in a “I’m joking, but not really” tone, that if we couldn’t manage to raise *any* money we would be responsible for at least a $10 donation to the org.
    I was just returned from parental leave with a preemie baby who’d been in the NICU for 4 months. I owed literally thousands of dollars for the life flight we’d had to take, not to mention the hospital stay. In a check-in with the Deputy Director I broke down crying, explaining I didn’t have the capacity for fundraising and couldn’t afford a $10 donation. The competition was cancelled the next day.
    I found out later that the most toxic staff member, whose duties *did* include development, received the $100 gift card because she, as the only staff member to participate, had raised the most money.

  118. hanners*

    I’m late to the party, but at my previous job (manufacturing in a small town) we had a contest related to the weight of a single employee.
    Our IT manager let us know he was going on a 1 week cruise vacation that had unlimited buffet. We had been to buffets before and knew that he loved to eat and would definitely be indulging on the cruise. Important to note that he was not overweight, so the discussion at our engineering lunch table turned to how much weight he would gain/lose on the cruise.

    Things escalated from there. We started jokingly placing bets, which turned more serious and ended up with a collection of cash and bets placed throughout the plant on how much weight he would gain (or lose) during the week away. We made him stand on our industrial scale to weigh in before he left (after lunch) and we weighed him the day he got back (before lunch). The pot of money up for grabs ended up being almost $100, which got split between the 5 “winners” and our IT manager didn’t get anything other than “bragging rights”.

  119. Puggles*

    1. We had a Halloween costume contest during the Covid lockdown. There were some folks who went all out and dressed up in nice or scary costumes but truthfully all we could see was their face. I put on a Joe Biden mask, changed my screen name to “Jim Carey as Joe Biden” and won!
    2. Still during the Covid lockdown on Zoom, we had a St. Patrick’s drink contest where we showed our most unusual drink. I mixed blue and yellow Gatorade that turned a nice green color and told everybody it was absinthe, served it in a nice glass goblet and won again!

  120. Shirley You're Joking*

    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 non-profit 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.)

    It should be said, too, that the manager’s pumpkin was completely forgettable and run of the mill and definitely not worthy of winning.

  121. Global Cat Herder*

    There are a couple of workplace “Biggest Loser” contests above, but my workplace did one too. It was theoretically optional, but the C-Suite had thought this up and was participating, so a lot of people felt pressured. They did 4-6 weeks of Biggest Loser, then 1-2 weeks off, then 4-6 weeks of Biggest Loser again. Basically using the company as their coerced accountability buddies for their own weight loss goals.

    One of the EAs, who didn’t have much to lose in the first place, felt really pressured into participating and following the same incredibly restrictive eating plan her exec was doing (for lunch you can have 2 cups of any deep green leafy vegetable – like, that’s the entire lunch, 2 cups of raw kale). It ended up doing rather severe long-term damage to her body and she had to go on disability retirement, which the company CONTESTED as not being work-related.

    They still occasionally do Biggest Loser contests, just not back-to-back ones.

  122. Liz*

    Outing myself if my old coworkers are reading, but during covid, my division of my company (around 150 people spread around the country) started having monthly contests & 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 (lol) instead of some monster mask & emailed it 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!

    1. Strive to Excel*

      It speaks to my level of nerd that I initially interpreted this as “Clayface” – the Batman villain – vs a clay facemask that one would use for skincare.

      1. NotSoRecentlyRetired*

        Thank you for the explanation. I was thinking of something made in a children’s art class and fired in a kiln, which probably would have been totally appropriate.

  123. Just Another Cog*

    At my old company, our team leader came up with the silliest team building contests. Once, we had a Valentines Box decorating contest. We had to put Valentines like the ones you buy for your kids every year for ELEMENTARY school in each box. Mine was pretty lame as I was not one bit on board with this idea for a bunch of adults being forced to do this sort of thing. Also, we had to do it on our own time and with our own money. The winner, chosen by the C-suite people, was an elaborate, glittered box of the company logo.

  124. MAC*

    Many many years ago, the place I worked had a soup cookoff. A bunch of us signed up to bring in different types of homemade soup, the rest of the office would pay like 25 cents per small sample, and then vote for the winner. I think the money went to United Way or something like that. I made my mom’s slow cooker Taco Soup and won the vote, which included a gift basket with a couple of soup mugs and a few other small items. Our admin was SO OFFENDED that she didn’t win … come to find out she had bought grocery store soup and just heated it up in her slow cooker! Her reasoning was that “people should have like “professionally” made food better than homemade!”
    .
    Oddly, years later I worked AT a United Way, and on my 2nd day, there was a team breakfast that included a contest to make the most creatively shaped pancakes. I am not artistic AT ALL, so I just spelled out “Go University Mascot” (of my alma mater) and the director picked me as the winner, I think because I was so new and she was trying to make me feel welcome. I found out later she got her doctorate from a branch campus of the same university and that people thought I was sucking up to her with my entry!

  125. Pottery Yarn*

    Our office has an annual dessert contest, and one woman would ALWAYS bring in her banana pudding and ALWAYS won. One year, someone else had the audacity to bring in a different banana pudding, and for the first time ever, she didn’t win. Mind you, the other banana pudding didn’t win either, but that didn’t stop her from being outraged. Instead, my colleague won with her no-bake cheesecake using the recipe on the cream cheese box. Ms. Banana Pudding was so salty about the results and complained at every opportunity. We didn’t have a dessert contest the next year.

  126. Texas Teacher*

    We had a 5th grade vs staff kickball game. A teacher ended up injured and had to have surgery. The district banned student staff athletic events after that.

    We had a pep rally and as a surprise, the teachers had to do different races. Due to our idiot principal’s misogyny, we were in dress shoes. I face-planted and busted my glasses. He did not want to let the counselor drive me to the eye doctor to get them fixed. I am not blind without them but will get nauseated if I do not wear them. Had to call HR and file a complaint to get permission to leave campus to get my glasses fixed. (Luckily I went to an eye doctor near the school not near my home an hour away. ) New district rule – admin had to ask staff to participate, allow proper clothing/shoes to be worn, no retaliation for refusing. Coach hit the roof because she was not warned either bc she would have insisted we have proper shoes for this reason.

  127. starsandmars*

    At the high school where I work, the kids love a special event scavenger hunt. Hide some paper pumpkins or tiny candy canes for cheap gifts, and they are pretty delighted.

    Last year our admin decided that for pre-holiday morale, the teachers deserved their own special scavenger hunt, and placed this responsibility on the newest member of our front office staff, who created the Duck Hunt. The rules were very simple: she scattered tiny plastic ducks throughout the building and you could trade a little duck for candy, and those who found the most at the end of the week would get special prizes. And this was fun at first!

    Until she was asked how many ducks there were on day two after the candy supply was running low already from staff going rather wild for the duck hunt. She had bought a bulk package of the toys and made no note of exactly how many tiny plastic duckies there were or where they were hidden, nor did she have an idea so as to make sure she had enough fun sized treats for every duck. She set two student assistants off to scatter the whole package all throughout our building, so even she couldn’t say where they all were hidden.

    There were. So many. Ducks. And no sign of when we had successfully hunted them all. They were still being located all the way up to summer vacation, and when someone found one in their room when coming back after this year’s summer in-service, I really thought she was going to cry when they brought it to her.

  128. Pottery Yarn*

    Another time, HR decided to have a Biggest Loser contest. Not even touching on the problematic nature of weight-loss contests at work, the whole thing was a poorly thought out train wreck. HR insisted that we open the contest to all employees…at more than a dozen locations around the world. They had no plan for how weighing in and out would work, who would be in charge of doing it, or even how to do it, since the offices aren’t equipped with scales. They also had no plan for (securely) managing everyone’s private health information. Despite all these issues, they forged ahead and let people weigh in and out on the honor system at the satellite offices. Meanwhile, they hired a personal trainer to do it at the main office, and the personal trainer royally messed up everyone’s BMI and percent body fat calculations. Like, told a 5’10”, 200-pound woman that she was morbidly obese and 80% body fat, which caused her to have a breakdown in the middle of the office. Once the massive error was brought to the trainer’s attention, she denied it was incorrect and tried to convince people to buy her MLM supplements. It was pure madness. Thankfully, COVID hit the following year, so they didn’t try to bring it back while everyone was WFH.

  129. Poss*

    Old Workplace had a competition born more out of necessity. The CEO went on leave and one of the directors acted in his place; during this time he decided to rebrand the organisation from stationery up to external signage.

    When the CEO returned, the director proudly showed the advertising reel to the management team – there was silence and open mouths, followed by the establishment of the competition to hunt down and destroy all vestiges of the new branding. Winner got a voucher to our gift shop.

      1. Pamela S*

        I don’t want to give too much away, but think serious conservation organisation being branded with anthropomorphic talking animals discussing how to escape.

  130. Jesucka309*

    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 metres 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.

  131. Nelly*

    We are doing STEPtember at my current organisation, and my team are killing it. Almost literally. We are going through massive changes at work that are requiring huge amounts of physical effort (including moving furniture and fixtures and janitorial work) from librarians who have gone from a normal 10k steps a day on average, to 30k plus every day. One team member worked an incidental half marathon worth of steps on Wednesday. Some of these team members are 60 years plus. We’ve had three team members drop down, some during the working day in front of customers, with illness and exhaustion and injuries. Yay, for moral! But hey, the organisation will give the winners of STEPtember a $5 coupon to their own brand coffee shop.

  132. (former) Research Assistant*

    This isn’t especially crazy but just goes to show how utterly disconnected senior employees can be from the rest of us (and by that I mean fresh out of college working a dead end job marketed as a “jumping point” for better).

    I worked in research as a research assistant and the study I was assigned to involved bringing in an oftentimes difficult clinical population for a battery of tests that included an hour-ish long MRI. Because of the study requirements recruitment was incredibly slow because many, if not most, of the population I was dealing with took medication that made them ineligible for the study. I wasn’t the only one having issues. Other research assistants on MRI studies also had problems because their assigned studies had common disqualifiers and were also working with difficult populations. Because of the lag in recruitment the MRI wasn’t being utilized as often as that part of the organization would have liked (whenever the MRI was used, that part of the org would get some money from the funding grant).

    So someone, I think it was some of the scientists and maybe higher admin, came up with a contest that for every MRI study you did you’d get entered into a raffle. I think the prize was something like a $100 visa gift card but it might have been $50. It would go for a month with a drawing at the end and I think they considered extending it longer and make it a monthly thing.

    This went over terribly and there was a lot of grumbling. It felt so out of touch and felt like they just thought we were being lazy. Shockingly, trying to get people with (often) pretty severe disabilities into an MRI isn’t as easy as throwing up a study on MTurk or doing phone interviews and there’s only so many people you can try and recruit at any given time. Word got back to the people who had this brilliant idea and the contest never actually materialized. But this was an org where they tried to play off pretty basic perks (an occasional pizza lunch) as some grand gesture of appreciation.

  133. Perihelion*

    At a previous job we were doing a simple quiz game. One of the questions was, “What is the closest planet to the sun?” I said Mercury, only to be informed that it is Mars. And… no one believed me. About elementary school knowledge. And I studied math and physics in university and was the department’s data specialist.

    I was tempted to post a diagram of the solar system in the office after but decided to let it go. As I hoped, the assistant director looked it up and discovered that I was right. The quiz’s creator blamed Google. Sigh.

    1. allathian*

      Username checks out.

      People who have such a limited grasp of things most people should learn in elementary school shouldn’t be running quizzes.

  134. Loop*

    My work held a ‘best mug’ competition and I chose not to participate. After the competition had ended, some of my coworkers asked me why I didn’t enter my ‘nice Starbucks tumbler’, and I had to reveal to them that it was a Lovecraftian parody mug with Cthulhu replacing the siren and the phrases ‘pestilent race of Man’ and ‘aeons of madness and blood’ included in the eco-friendly blurb stamped on it…
    For reference, the contest was won by a ‘Little Miss Yorkshire’ mug.

    1. Poss*

      I have one that reads, “Plots have I laid, inductions dangerous” from Richard III. Wonder how that would have gone down in a Best Mug competition.

    2. GoryDetails*

      I would love the Cthulhu mug! (I have a non-parody Cthulhu mug now, as it happens. Also, a Calamityware “Things Could Be Worse” mug, which looks like a lovely traditional blue-and-white porcelain design, until you look closer and see the robots and pterodactyls and Bigfoot and… Yeah.

      Oh, and then there’s my Despair.com mug – the “Procrastination” one: “Hard work often pays off after time, but laziness always pays off now.” Probably *not* the sentiment I’d want my management to see!

      1. allathian*

        Depends on how uptight your management is and on your reputation at work. If you’re a great employee in a fairly easygoing environment people will see it as the joke it’s meant to be. If not, well…

        Several people at my job, including a former manager, had mugs that said “You don’t have to be crazy to work here, but it sure helps!” and none of them got any pushback for it as far as I know. And my employer’s pretty decent with great work/life balance provisions, etc.

      2. Nessun*

        I ADORE Calamityware! I have their mugs, teacups & saucers, and a small dish. I want the teapot!! I have always loved blue willow pattern teaware, but the addition of WTH Is Happening There is just brilliant.

  135. Poss*

    Old Workplace had a competition born more out of necessity – it was the necessity that was the disaster. The CEO went on leave and one of the directors acted in his place; during this time he decided to rebrand the entire organisation from stationery up to external signage.

    When the CEO returned, the director proudly showed the advertising reel to the management team – there was silence and open mouths, followed by the establishment of the competition to hunt down and destroy all vestiges of the new branding. Winner got a voucher to our gift shop.

    2. Roy G. Biv*

      Massive overstep by the director? or GUMPTION! Either way, a search and destroy competition sounds like fun.

  136. The Kulprit*

    2nd person is the hero we need! I’m gonna tell myself the doggo won.

    3rd one is just trifling.

  137. CatMouse*

    Not gone wrong, but amusing and sorta right? When we all got sent to wfh at the call center I worked at, they would do health initiatives (emails about washing hands, keeping distance, healthy eating) all pretty tame and easy to ignore. Then they did a weekly activity challenge. Just share with this one HR person your activity data for a week (ideally step counts) and a highlight on what one of your activities was (Completely voluntary, winners were awarded “swag bucks” to buy company gear). Once a week a winner would be announced “Martha has earned $10 swag bucks, one day she played in the backyard with her dog!” sort of thing.

    One person I knew that one had gotten a ridiculously low number of steps (they told me after they won) and claimed it was strolling around the yard, when really it was just going from their desk to kitchen/bathroom and bed.

  138. Not a Poet*

    the management of a former company where morale was in the toilet directly due to said management’s incompetence and indifference thought that they could smooth things over with a haiku contest(?!). It did not work. I still have my obviously unsubmitted entry:

    A captainless ship
    Narrowly avoiding rocks
    The crew keeps afloat

  139. M313*

    I’ve told this story before, but I think it’s been a few years, so I’ll tell it again.

    I previously worked for a company that did “holiday decorating contests” around Xmas. To me, this just read as the owner effectively saying, “Decorate the office on your own time and out of your own pocket, and be grateful to me for it,” so I wasn’t a fan (there were a lot of times where the owner or management would decide to do something “fun” and then foist the costs off onto the staff, so that may have contributed to my intense dislike of these things).

    Anyway, the owner wanted to keep these things secular, and while I appreciated not having religion forced upon us, I did think they took it a tad too far, considering even things like colored lights weren’t allowed. As a result of this, each year would have a theme to it that we were supposed to decorate around. One year, the theme was “Winter in New York City” and the supervisor I worked with was *way* too into these contests. She got the idea into her head that she was going to bring in the Naked Cowboy to really sell it. For those who don’t know, the Naked Cowboy’s a guy who goes around NYC playing guitar while wearing only tighty-whities, a cowboy hat, and cowboy boots. He’s sort of a living tourist attraction.

    The owner was such a prude that she sometimes got upset about people showing too much ankle or shoulder and would cancel casual Fridays for the whole office for months over it, so I tried to convince this supervisor, repeatedly, that bringing a dude into the office in only underwear was a really bad idea, but she wouldn’t hear of it.

    Somewhat anticlimactically, it turns out that it’s really expensive to have the Naked Cowboy come to your private party, and all the plans to have someone else play the part fell through.

    That said, nothing tops the first year we did this contest.

    The owner kept teasing some mystery prize for the winning team or department. Now, the owner was extremely cheap, so I felt very confident it would be really lame, but a lot of my coworkers were really into it and wanted that prize.

    The contest happens, and the owner pulls an “everybody wins” and declares that rather than just having Christmas Day off, we’d have Christmas Eve off as well (they were Monday and Tuesday that year).

    Everyone else seemed really happy about this, but my first reaction was horror. Our work was such that we were always doing paperwork generated from the previous week, and we needed to be done with it end of day on Friday, regardless of anything else. So that meant we’d be cramming five days of work into a three day week instead of a four day week. I mentioned to several of my coworkers that I thought this was a bad idea, but they told me to calm down, quit being an Eeyore, it’ll be fine.

    Wednesday after Xmas rolls around, and we find out that a member of our very small team has the flu so bad she can’t even get out of bed and almost certainly won’t be in at all that week.

    We worked 12-14 hour days Wed-Fri that week, and someone made a GIANT mistake because we were all so exhausted. Most of that short yet long week is a blur to me, but I assume I probably said “I told you so” more than once.

  140. Wolf*

    We had a cookie-baking contest. Which is a cute idea, isn’t it? Everyone gets to taste cookies and chat about family recipes?

    Unfortunately, this was in academia, so most of us were PhD students with little budget. Several of us didn’t even live in places with a full kitchen where we could have baked anything.

    The boss then steamrolled the group into giving her the win… for cookies that her nanny baked and delivered to the office. They were good, but the whole thing stuck in our minds as a tone-deaf event.

    1. Librarian*

      We did a cookie baking contest, by department though, recruiting the Friends of the Library to judge blind. We delivered the cookies to a room, then someone brought the Friends in so they didn’t see which department made which cookies. Then there was accusations that children’s cheated by presenting their cookies on a plate decorated with the alphabet and little kids, and the Friends like the children’s department. Then someone who could bake really well and creatively transferred departments, but old home department tried to claim she still baked for their department. People hung out around the outside of the judging room, saying things like “Isn’t it great that SUZIE likes CHOCOLATE CHIP COOKIES with SPRINKLES so much” loudly through the closed door to influence the voting. Then many of the Friends members (average age in the 80s) got tired of eating that many cookies (judging was at 9 am. and we didn’t even provide milk) or their doctors said they couldn’t. Then the director was supposed to judge. That’s where the contest died. Prize was only winning and getting to say your department won.

    2. Rainy*

      Lollll did your boss’s last name start with a G…We had a chancellor at my undergrad institution who would over order the cookie plates for faculty meetings and then shame everyone into only taking one so that she could take the rest home and use them as her “contribution” for her kids’ school functions.

  141. OneLuckyDuck*

    Every year our financial services company held an elaborate “team bonding” day on a Saturday that was technically optional but yeah, not really. There was wine tasting, apple picking, a scavenger hunt, and more, all along a driving route so elaborate that it took about 6 hours to complete, to say nothing of trying to ensure that everyone rode with a designated driver on the gold country era backroads while swapping cars and drinking heavily throughout the day. It all culminated in a dinner with more alcohol and… a contest.
    Every year, Percy took *hours* away from his sales job to coordinate this event. Plotting the route. Planning the activities. Ensuring that everyone from all the far-flung offices would attend. Setting little rewards up at different stores for participating in challenges. You’d get a playing card for every place you went, and for every challenge you tried. And the contest winner was the person who had put together the best poker hand with the cards they earned.
    Every year, Tom cheated and won the contest. He would trade cards with people, grab some extras at the events, speed from place to place to be first to pick his card at the store (obvs not allowed but what was the owner of the local chocolate shop going to do, say no?), you name it, he did it.
    I joined the company and volunteered to be on the planning committee, just to meet some of my new coworkers. Percy went on and on and on about Tom’s cheating, the ill-gotten prizes he’d won, the unfairness of it all, etc, etc, etc. Come to find out, everyone found it pretty funny to help Tom cheat just to watch Percy go ballistic every year at the company party, but I guess Percy didn’t see that and I felt bad for him so I suggested a game with too big of a chance component to rig. Percy was very happy and couldn’t wait to see how Tom handled his first loss!
    The game was structured like before, going from place to place and collecting unique, non-duplicable markers (I hand wrote the options on special paper). Everyone got a randomly selected board in a sealed envelope at their dinner place setting, no swapping, no peeking before choosing your envelope. Percy called out the winning numbers himself. Tom got the grand prize from hitting BINGO first, all pieces were legit. Unsurprisingly, Percy looked like he either wanted to punch Tom out or cry.
    … Thus, the wrathful gods of teambuilding contests claimed another victim that night.

  142. blatherskite71*

    One leg of a “relay” for our Holiday Festivities one year was to stuff a bunch of cookies in your face and choke them down with eggnog. Unluckily for me I had undiagnosed achalasia (esophagus doesn’t work). So i was able to get the cookies and eggnog in my mouth but not really swallow them. Basically just spewed the mess out, ala Kevin trying broccoli in The Office. Everyone thought it was hilarious. I was mortified but it did prompt me to go to the doctor and get a diagnosis and treatment. Could totally rock that contest now, but we’re work from home!

  143. Skeptic53*

    When I was 12 or so I had a paper route. There was an Air Force Base 10 miles from town, and a huge housing development halfway between town and the base. The paper would have a competition for getting new subscriptions (“starts”). There was no penalty for cancellations (“stops”). My friend had a route on base that included the airmen’s barracks. They were constantly being transferred to other bases and replaced, so my friend got huge numbers of starts. He got a bike, got to go to Disneyland, etc. I lived in the housing development where turnover of households was practically nil. People either took the paper or they didn’t. I never won so much as a lollipop. My first lesson in life being unfair.

  144. Lou's Girl*

    Worked in banking several years ago whose corporate office was in a fairly large US city. They were constantly having contests to see who could open the most new accounts. I worked in an ‘off’ department- think Compliance or Accounting- who had zero customer interaction. But nonetheless, our Sr VP thought we should participate too, at least against each other.

    I happened to speak with a friend of mine, and she mentioned that she had stopped by one of our branches and opened an account. I sent it in as a referral, so at least I had one, right?

    I won. I won with 1 referral. The prize? A premium parking space in the building. For 1 month the winner could park in the building (covered, secured, deck parking) and not have to sludge through blocks of traffic and bad weather.

    Except I worked from home. Full time. It was rare that I ever went to the office as I actually lived in the next state, about 200 miles from the corporate office. To his credit, my Sr VP calculated the actual cost of parking in the building for 1 month and sent me the cash equivalent.

  145. 1 Non Blonde*

    My work one year decided that each department was going to do a gingerbread house contest. My department was full of architects and engineers, in a conservation government organization, so we were in the definite minority. Our boss at the time gave us the entire week prior to the contest to make sure we had the absolute best house. I’m talking full 8 hour days for a straight week just building this thing—including the company credit card for supplies, and time during the work day to go to craft stores to find the items we needed. Because we know how to skirt requirements (iykyk), we were able to build a TO SCALE model of one of our newly constructed offices, and easily won the contest, especially since a lot of departments gave the kit to their kids/grandkids to decorate. I don’t even think there was a prize?? If there was, it wasn’t memorable.

  146. Librarian*

    At a prior workplace, we were self funded for workers comp, so at the end of the year if we came in under budget, a % of what was not spent would we divided up among the employees in the department and given to us on our paychecks. I got the intent “you all work together to have a safe workplace” what mostly happened was a certain number of people telling others not to report injuries, and others taking away anything that may cause injuries. So think a needed stepladder goes away, not the need for it though, so we are just using unsafe chairs to stand on. It came to a head when the paper cutter was taken out of the children’s department (a lot of crafts and stuff does on in the children’s department) and an employee reported and injury and wrote on their report that a colleague had gotten a bandaid out of her purse and told her not to fill out a form so they could all get some money.

  147. Verdande*

    That third story also happened at my dad’s workplace, except the guy who did it got 2nd place, fessed up immediately, and quite happily let the prize be re-awarded, so there wasn’t any drama over it.

  148. Aloysius Clyde*

    For a few months in my early twenties, I worked as a magazine telemarketer for an extremely well-known publisher of children’s media (many of you probably have memories of their book fairs from your childhood).

    At the beginning of the school year, management announced that our teams would be competing against other in various “spirit” contests over the course of the coming months, with the winning team receiving an unspecified reward at the end. Points were awarded by the Management Team, which was also competing (I’m sure you see where this is going…).

    The contests were essentially a series of dress-up days — pajama day, sports day, inside-out day, etc. Some people really got into it, some of us did the bare minimum, and some of us avoided it as much as we could (I spent one of my rare sick days to escape pajama day).

    At the end of each day, the Management Team would announce which team had shown the most spirit and how many points they were awarded.

    At the end of the whole series of contests, the Management Team announced that they had won and threw themselves a pizza party, in a conference room that the rest of us had to walk past to get anywhere in the building.

    Sadly, that wasn’t even the company’s most egregious treatment of their employees… My dad was writing a book on prison management at the time and even used some examples from my time there are as things to not do.

  149. UnsafeVegetable*

    A place I worked was pretty good at doing fun employee engagement stuff, but one that went a bit wrong was a day of task-master type activities, including who can eat a cucumber the quickest.

    The nature of the contest meant finding “loopholes” was encouraged – one person had some success in blending their cucumber and then drinking it, although they weren’t the fastest!

    Unfortunately, some else (in their first week on the job, no less) was trying to eat with a bit too much enthusiasm. They injured the inside of their mouth and had to be taken to hospital, resulting in several days off work!! It ended up being the company’s first lost-time reportable health & safety incident in their six year existence…

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