the pumpkin conspiracy, the illegitimate squirrel, and other office competitions gone bad

by Alison Green on September 9, 2024

Last week we talked about office contests gone awry. Here are 13 of the funniest stories you shared.

1. The bugs

Early in my career as a software engineer, the company wanted to improve the quality of the software products. They offered cash bonuses to the testing teams for finding bugs, and cash bonuses to the developers if the bugs were fixed within a week. As you might expect, the developers started planting bugs in the code so they could get the bonus for fixing them.
Unfortunately, testing rarely catches all of the bugs. Quality dropped and complaints jumped as customers found the bugs that the testers missed.

2. The squirrel

When I worked for a city government, I served a stint on the Employee Advisory Committee (we hosted parties, fundraisers, blood drives, charity runs, etc. for employees, as a means of keeping everyone slightly happier, I guess). Anyway, one time we tried a “cutest pet” contest. I don’t even think we awarded prizes; it was just something to do and distract ourselves for a week from the monotony of issuing building permits and renewing driver’s licenses. All we asked was for participants to email a photo of their pet, then we sent out an email with all the pictures compiled and asked employees to vote for their favorite, anonymously via an online poll. Again, it was ALL optional and I don’t think we were even giving out prizes!

One person sent in a photo of a squirrel (in a tree). I remember thinking at the time, “Huh but whatever” (I mean it’s totally reasonable that someone doesn’t actually have a pet, maybe they “adopted” their backyard squirrel … small local government workers are quirky people!). I included the squirrel pic in the mix (which was mostly dogs and cats dressed up in little outfits).

Little did I know this would fully turn into SquirrelGate – I had so many people complain that this was Unfair, Not A Legitimate Pet, Animal Cruelty, etc. THEN, some dogged detective did a reverse image search and found the photo came from a public website (I think it was like the fifth image that came up if you google “squirrel”) so the SQUIRREL WASN’T EVEN REAL, and that revelation got people even more mad. I’m absolutely not kidding – I had more departments contacting me about this damn squirrel than I had in my previous five years working for that city. We had to issue a disclaimer and remove the squirrel votes from the tabulation; it was a Whole Thing. Needless to say, it was the last cutest pet contest we put on. I think the guy who sent in the squirrel in the first place (as a troll) got exactly the reaction he was hoping for.

3. The videos

We had a contest where we were supposed to make a video about our team’s work, except there was no prize, and it wasn’t optional. Nobody wanted to do it, but if you’re going to make us, you’ll get what you get…

We filmed four of us sitting at our desks, doing our boring desk jobs, for whatever the required length of the video was. Then someone combined these into a four-way split screen. Done. That was our entry. It got what might have been the biggest laugh at the also-required viewing session, because while we certainly weren’t the only ones who thought the whole thing was stupid, we were the only ones with the chutzpah to take the assignment so literally.

4. The game

I was a grad student at a very tech-oriented university where the atmosphere was extremely competitive and the gender ratio skewed heavily male. The computers in our lab all ran a game called Hextris — like Tetris, but the tiles were hexagonal instead of square. The game would display the names and scores of the top players when you opened it, and one of the guys in the lab became absolutely obsessed with always having the top score. He would check it multiple times a day, and if anyone beat his score, he would sit and play — sometimes for hours at a time — until he was on top again.

So one of the other students hacked the game, and made it always display somebody else’s score at the top whenever this guy signed on. It drove him completely wild, and he wasted several days doing nothing but playing that stupid game (instead of, say, studying or writing his thesis) before he finally caught on.

5. The braggart

In our office, many people share a love for spicy food.

Mark (fake name of course) was one of those guys who loved to think he did everything better than other people. Did you go on vacation to Maldives? He went to Mars. Did you purchase a new laptop? His was built by Bill Gates himself, and so on.

One day, a potluck was organized to celebrate a coworker moving to another country. This person adored spicy food, so some of us prepared it. There was plenty of regular food, but to avoid incidents, the spicy one was labelled appropriately. Now, one of the dishes was a stew with a sauce made with Carolina Reapers. I was used to spicy food, but that one literally burnt my tongue. I loved it!

Once Mark saw a group of us eating that dish, he wanted to try it. We tried to warn him that it was really spicy, maybe take a small, small bite to see how you do.

He grabbed a spoon from the table, took a generous portion of the stew and proceed to smugly telling us that he was perfectly able to handle spicy food. He GULPED the entire bowl while we stared in horror (and a bit of delight in my case). Long story short, an ambulance was called after he collapsed on the floor gagging and writhing in pain.

Once he returned, he still had the gall to claim that it was indigestion and not stupidity that caught him. Someone left a small jar of Carolina Reaper extract on his desk a couple of days later since he wouldn’t drop the subject. He threw it in the bin, and never commented about it again.

6. The sweater

Last year we decided to do an office-wide Christmas sweater contest to end our holiday charity giving campaign. There were three cash prizes for the most festive sweaters. Usually, the office is pretty laid back about these type of contests and they go off without much of a fuss. This one was different.

We had a happy hour event where people voted for the sweaters anonymously. Apparently one of my coworkers was extremely upset that she did not win first place (she came in second) and she spent the entire evening insulting the first place winner. She even asked people if they wanted to redo the vote and if they should model the sweaters because there’s no way she should have lost. I couldn’t believe the other person actually agreed to the “modeling” and re-voting; they ended up strutting through the bar in their sweaters and doing the vote all over again. The complaining coworker lost a second time and spent the remainder of the evening asking us if we liked her because there’s no way we could have possibly thought the other sweater was more festive than hers.

7. The pumpkin carving contest

Each year, my company held a pumpkin carving contest. I was the organizer one year. Employees would judge the entries in various categories. If we had 10 entries, we were thrilled. It was low-stakes. It was a nonprofit organization and there were no prizes. Entrants were aware that they were competing for the glory of bragging rights. And yet…

One manager (who was no one’s favorite) told her team that her pumpkin was #6 and to vote for her. And, yes, her pumpkin was on the table next to the #6 when she dropped it off that morning, but I later needed to move the pumpkins around before the judging began and she was no longer pumpkin #6. Well. By the time she found out, her team had already voted and dutifully voted for her because she was their pushy manager. Our low-tech online polling system did not allow for re-dos. She was loudly upset at me; at the unfairness of it all. She yelled at me that she told her team to vote for #6 but that wasn’t her pumpkin! I don’t think she realized how bad this made her look. We’re talking about a person over the age of 50 who was a director of a team and who stood to gain nothing from winning this contest.

I believe that her team accidentally voted for a unicorn pumpkin painted by a very nice person in another department. (See how laid-back this was? We allowed *painted* pumpkins in a Pumpkin Carving Contest.)

8. The face mask

During Covid, my division of my company (around 150 people spread around the country) started having monthly contests and the winner would be announced during our monthly team calls. In October, the contest was “show us your favorite mask” – you know, Halloween-themed. So, as a joke, I put on a clay face mask (the kind for skin care) instead of some monster mask and emailed a photo off to the coordinator with a snarky “does this count” lol. I hit reply-all accidentally. And realized it far too late to recall it. The only balm (uh, aside from the facemask) for my mortification was I tied for the win. Was it out of pity? Probably. Don’t care – I used that $10 Amazon card like nobody’s business!

9. The leg

A corporate-sponsored speaker came in right after we were ordered to come back to the office to try and boost morale or something. None of the bosses or directors were there, having sent an email that they were working from home, which really ticked everyone off. We gave this speaker a pretty hard time, ignoring him and talking amongst ourselves. His presentations were mostly about why remote work was never going to be the norm and some stuff that was union-bustingly awkward. He tried to get us up and involved with, “Okay, who can stand on one foot the longest! Woo! Let’s get that blood pumping!” My coworker, RJ, is an amputee so he popped his leg off and left it standing, sat back down and dug a novel out of his bag and started to read. RJ is my hero.

10. The Christmas competition

I used to work for an office supplies company that held an annual Christmas decorating competition. Every department used to go all out. Lights, handmade decorations, trees etc.

One year they realized it was a bit over the top and starting to cost people, so they made a rule that only recycled goods could be used. The marketing department had a surplus of Christmas catalogues that year and spent weeks papering their area. There was a catalogue tree, catalogue snow flakes, catalogue Santa.

It looked amazing and they won. THE UPROAR. “Did any of our customers even get a catalogue or did marketing hoard them all for the competition??” The catalogues were mostly misprints, but the hours they’d put into the decorations kind of added up too. How are they “so overworked” but had time for that?

You would think that would shut the comp down, but it just got more competitive. Trees made out of old printer cartridges and reams of paper. Santa’s workshops with elaborate cardboard fittings attached to lights. Marketing tried to one up themselves and designed a full 18-hole Christmas-themed mini golf course around the office. Another team made their staff follow the judges around caroling.

I no longer work there but it was definitely becoming a hazard. You couldn’t walk two meters without tripping over some cardboard golf course or knocking a series of snowflake buntings down. Teams would spend weeks making decorations instead of working. Then by new years the recycling and by extension dumpsters would be filled with stapled painted and taped up paper decorations and cardboard.

The prize? A fish and chip lunch.

I hope they no longer go to such lengths now but the amount of time money and resources wasted on a team-building exercise was crazy.

11. The pumpkins, part 2

We have a notoriously difficult assistant, Ann, who truly has a talent for finding things to complain about. One year, we had a pumpkin decorating contest, and the pumpkins were all donated to a local kids charity after. Ann first complained that she does not believe in Halloween and this would indoctrinate the kids at the charity. She then complained that anyone who has time to decorate a pumpkin must not be doing their job. Finally, when she saw the decorated pumpkins, she complained that not enough people had entered (we had like 12), and it was an embarrassment to our organization that we couldn’t come together for the kids.

12. The snow

Several winters ago, Minnesota received a larger-than-usual snowfall. The company who plowed the area around our business ran out of room and pushed the snow from the last several snowstorms into a far corner of our parking lot. This area was shaded, so the snow took forever to melt. The owner of the company decided that whoever correctly guessed the day the snow was finally melted would receive a gift card.

The intensity with which my coworkers determined their guesses was impressive. They consulted long-range forecasts and the Farmer’s Almanac, performed simple melting tests on their coffee breaks; for a period of time, I mulled over updating our mission statement, as apparently “make money” was no longer it. Once all the guesses were in, the wait began.

Since my office window was the closest to the snow pile, I got the joy of people trudging in and out of my office all day long. Rainy days, which sped up the melt, were everyone’s nemesis. I got so tired of the contest, I mentally tabulated the length of extension cord it would take to use my hair dryer (in the dead of night) to melt that sucker and be done with it.

Who won? No one. The rule was that your guess had to be the exact day the snow was gone – not a day before or after. Only one coworker was left standing and judging by his guess and the weather forecast, he was soon to be the happy owner of a Walmart gift card. His victory was not to be, however, since our owner’s frugal side refused to be denied and convinced him that sneaking out to the little snow pile and heaving coffee cups full of snow onto the lawn was a completely reasonable thing to do. I have watched enough mob movies to know that “snitches get stitches” and because I was the solo witness, my coworkers were never told of the sad, duplicitous end to our snow pile.

13. The new year’s decorating contest

Back in my early career, I was employed in a call center. Call centers are notorious for being a lot like high school but with more drama, and this one was no different. You had to bid on shifts regularly, with your rank based on performance, and over time things had coalesced so that I was on a stable team with other oddballs — a handful of lifers and people who were using the relatively high wages to support them through school. We all came in, kept our heads down, and avoided the drama as much as possible.

Part of the environment was regular decorating contests, which my group always ignored. We were all top performers so the consequences were minimal, but upper management clearly thought we had a bad attitude. So when they announced that the COO would be flying in to tour the site in December 2012, our manager was told that we HAD to participate in the New Year’s decorating contest. She announced this to the team and said she didn’t care design we chose, as long as we did a minimum decorating level. In the silence that followed, one of the students spoke up to clarify that she did indeed mean “any design,” and she confirmed that she did not care.

For those of you have forgotten, in late 2012 there was a whole weird New Age apocalypse thing going around, based on the supposed end of the Mayan calendar. The proposed design was “New Year apocalypse” and my team was suddenly very enthusiastic about decorating. We built a huge 3D Mayan pyramid that we put over our manager’s cubicle, with smaller ones on every desk. We were fortunate enough to have a large plate glass window in our area, and we painted a large comet coming in for impact. We discussed wearing tin foil hats, but decided they didn’t work with the headsets, so instead we put them on top of our monitors. We made a large banner proclaiming, “Welcome to the New Year… hope you survive the experience!” which we put up just before the COO got to the floor.

I have fond memories of our site manager explaining that we were the top performing team in the site to the COO while glaring at us. Our manager remained serene throughout, and when the votes for the contest were counted we came in second. Interestingly enough, there were very specific guidelines for all further decorating contests while I was there, and no one said another word when my team continued to ignore them.

You may also like:
{ 191 comments }

{ 191 comments… read them below }

  1. Falling Diphthong*

    I love all the examples in which someone is chill about 837 things… but then 838 arrives and it is TIME TO THROW DOWN.

    1. Will "scifantasy" Frank*

      That particular perverse incentive is pretty universal in programming–Dilbert was making joked about it years before Scott Adams evolved into a PHB.

      Hell, the difference here is that QA and the coders didn’t collude to make sure that QA got its share of the pie.

      1. Regional Manager, Reindeer Hut*

        I came here to say that. They should all be fired for letting that poor code make it into production. A high-performing team would’ve ensured that all intentional bugs were caught.

        On the other hand, think of all the money the company saved by not having to pay those bonuses!

      3. EpicEscape*

        Yeah, this is all wrong. If you want a really high-quality product, you do what my old workplace did: penalize programmers for any bugs caught by QA, and penalize both programmers and QA for any bugs that make it into production.

        Programmers will stop adding features for fear of introducing bugs, everyone will spend their time blaming the bugs on each other rather than working together and you’ll end up firing all your programmers eventually for making too many errors, but at least you won’t have to pay any bonuses!

        1. SALC*

          If you penalize programmers for bugs making it into production the easiest thing is to just… do nothing. If you don’t write any code or make any changes or add any features you can’t introduce a bug!

          You have to have good mechanisms for catching bugs and minimizing the impact of the ones that do make it to production, and learn from the mistakes previously made, adding new safety mechanisms. Penalizing is only appropriate if people are willfully disregarding and bypassing safety mechanisms, or continuing to make the same mistake over and over

          1. Blue Horizon*

            Writing software that is so completely unrelated to business needs that nobody ends p using it also works. If nobody’s using the software, there won’t be any bug reports!

      5. Kevin Sours*

        Pretty sure it was referenced in The Jargon File well before that but I can’t find the particular entry right now. It’s generically known as The Cobra Effect.

    2. goddessoftransitory*

      I especially love #10 for this–when an entire company goes “team building? WE’LL SHOW YA TEAM BUILDING” and just goes full Mad Max and Reduce Recycle Reuse had a baby and IT IS US!

  3. Apex Mountain*

    Mine isn’t as much about the contest itself but the prize. This is around 15 years ago and a company I was working at had a sales contest – the top 3 salespeople of the month would get dinner at a nice restaurant with our VP Sales. The three of us who won were male as was the VP.

    So far so good – until we near the end of dinner and the VP says “since it’s all guys tonight, let’s go to the strip club down the block – two lap dances each on me”.

    I went but didn’t participate!

    3. Perihelion*

      The only thing less appealing than going to a strip club is going to a strip club with coworkers and a boss.

    4. NotRealAnonForThis*

      Ewwww

      I wonder if this is a former VP who I opted to quit partly due to. The “real Christmas party” was held after the official “Holiday Celebration Luncheon” with only “his boys” knowing about it. Except…they weren’t subtle in leaving the “Holiday Celebration Luncheon” and one in particular was very excited about hitting up “the T&A club” and very vocal about it.

  4. MissGirl*

    Sadly, these things can bring out my ultra-competitive and rule-loving side. I would’ve launched the protest against the squirrel entry and huffed about it. Perhaps it’s best I sit these out.

    1. Saturday*

      See, I absolutely would have voted for the squirrel (and the skin-care mask in #8).
      Anybody doing something unexpected and kind of goofy is going to earn my favor in these kinds of situations.

      1. Hastily Blessed Fritos*

        I would have happily voted for both as well. In real life I have voted for margaritas in a chili cookoff. (There were only two vegetarian entries, and it was held at the end of a long and hot day when nobody had access to air conditioning. The guy who brought a high-powered blender to camp on the beach definitely deserved some kind of prize, so “third place vegetarian chili” it was.

    2. The Prettiest Curse*

      My last job was quite into team-building stuff, but didn’t generally do contests. This may have been connected to the fact that one of my longest-tenured colleagues was ultra-competitive and would go a bit over the top in those situations, though at least she wasn’t a sore loser!

    3. Morning Reader*

      I feel compelled to mention that we had a pet squirrel in our house in college. She was quite cute; we named her Godot. Although all my cats are cuter.
      Godot was a baby found under a nearby bush after her mother was run over in the street. My roomie and the guy next door raised her. When she got older, they devised a home for her out of an old dresser with an opening to the window outside. By fall, we noticed that she was starting to bring boys home, so the window was closed and she became an outside, non-domesticated squirrel. She still remembered the house and for a couple of years after, she would visit with her babies in the yard or porch.
      All that said, I agree with you about rules, once it was discovered it was an internet squirrel. Like being catfished. Catsquirreled?

    4. commensally*

      I would have objected not to the squirrel (plenty of people do “adopt” local squirrels, and not everybody can have a pet, so to some extent that was a just protest against an exclusionary contest) but to the stock photo. But I bet you at least one of the dog/cat photos was also stock, and that the people mad about the squirrel didn’t check them all.

    5. Mel*

      RJ is my hero, too!
      I accept that companies want people to work in the office instead of remotely, but if none of the bosses are going to turn up at an event promoting the benefits of working in the office and are themselves going to work from home, then their hypocrisy absolutely deserves that kind of response.

    1. Anon Again... Naturally*

      I wish I had them! However, we dealt with credit card information so cameras and cell phones were strictly off limits. Just imagine a tacky cardboard wonderland and you’ll be 98% of the way there.

        1. Goldenrod*

          +1000

          I love this part: “The proposed design was “New Year apocalypse” and my team was suddenly very enthusiastic about decorating.”

          You are my people.

  7. JanetM*

    I have my own Carolina Reaper story. There’s a shop near me called The Pepper Palace, which always has samples of different hot sauces and salsas for tasting.

    I saw the sample of Carolina Reaper sauce, scooped up a chip’s worth, and popped it in my mouth. I had about a half-second of, “Oh, that tastes really good,” before I realized my error due to the volcano on my tongue. I found my husband and gasped, “NEED DAIRY. NOW.”

    He said, helpfully, “They have sodas in the fridge up front.”

    I said, “NO. DAIRY. NOW.”

    We left and headed down the road looking for dairy somewhere. Fortunately, there was a Ben and Jerry’s a few doors down. I ate a large bowl of ice cream and felt much better, although my mouth ached for a couple of hours.

    I have not repeated this mistake. I did, on another occasion, get sucked in by the Nasal Napalm horseradish challenge. That was also impressive but didn’t hurt for as long.

    2. JFC*

      Re: the Carolina Reaper one, my neighbor grows peppers and delights in telling stories about the hot pepper eating subculture. It’s apparently a whole thing across the country with competitions, events, growers fighting over whose pepper is truly the spiciest, metal music, etc. I like a nice splash of Tabasco or a comparable hot sauce but don’t need my insides feeling like they are on fire.

      1. JustaTech*

        There is an episode of the Netflix show “We Are the Champions” about the hot pepper eating scene and it was fascinating, particularly as someone with exactly zero spice tolerance.

      2. Dust Bunny*

        I like to taste food, not pain. I do love my Cholula but I don’t really want to fight with my meals.

      3. goddessoftransitory*

        Yeah, I’m a mild and lovin’ it type of gal. I don’t mind a little zip, a little zing, but even if I did like that kind of hot my digestive system just won’t put up with it anymore.

        1. Grizabella the Glamour Cat*

          I’m the same way. I have never understood the appeal of HOT spicy things, in particular. I guess they taste good to some people? But I. Don’t. Get. It. The only sensation I get from that stuff is PAIN, which, NO thank you very much!

      4. coffee*

        I’ve heard a lot of the “spiciest chilli plant” varieties are that spicy because they prioritise heat over taste, so I don’t feel like I’m missing out on them. Mind you this is just secondhand reporting, since I know my limits.

      5. Part time lab tech*

        Rumour has it the chilli fanatics may be linked to the periodic outbreaks of Queensland fruit fly in my city. (By smuggling them across state lines) Could be supermarket produce though.

    3. bamcheeks*

      Years ago one of my friends at uni cooked with peppers she’d grown herself, and like many self-grown peppers it was unpredictably hot. Unfortunately, in the process of cutting it up she’d also got it all over her hands and then touched her face. It was a slow burn one, so by the time she’d realised it REALLY HURT it was too late. So, working on the same theory as you, she went to the fridge and found a yoghurt (black cherry flavour) and started spreading it all over her face. At which point five of her brand new housemates that she hadn’t me before entered the kitchen. They didn’t speak much English at that point so she found herself quite unable to explain why she was plastering thick purple yoghurt all over her face, and just had to smile and wave.

      2. Indolent Libertine*

        This is why we held onto all our early-pandemic grocery-wiping gloves! I once had burning hands for hours after cutting chilis bare-handed. Sadly we had no yogurt in the house so I was trying canola oil and all sorts of other things, after making it So Much Worse by washing my hands with soap and water. That was a very uncomfortable day, and now I won’t go near peppers with uncovered hands.

        1. Bitte Meddler*

          After accidentally touching my face over a decade ago after rubbing a hot spice mixture onto a brisket, I bought a box of latex gloves.

          I use those gloves for everything from cutting onions, peeling an orange, hand-pulling cooked pork and chicken apart, all the way to massaging a medicated shampoo into my cat’s fur and cleaning the toilet.

          I now have two cats that get transdermal meds and, instead of using a whole glove to apply it, I just snip off one of the fingers.

          There are 1001 household uses for latex gloves.

          1. goddessoftransitory*

            If you run out of gloves to snip, ask your vet for finger cots! We got them the last time we had to apply dermal lotion to an unhappy Harvey.

        2. Hastily Blessed Fritos*

          Soap, without water, can actually help. Use oil first – the capsaicin is soluble in oil – then soap to get the oil off your hands. (It’s also soluble in alcohol, which led to a friend of mine alternating between pouring oil and cheap tequila on her fingers to get the stuff off.)

      3. goddessoftransitory*

        The first time I cut up poblanos and jalepenos for a recipe? I did not wear gloves. NEVER made that mistake again–my hands burned like a medieval illustration for “ring of hell.”

      4. Cedrus Libani*

        Sometimes you have to work with the solvents you’ve got.

        Years ago, I was working abroad, and was staying at a residence that included weekly housekeeping (fresh linens, etc). It was summer, and it was HOT. One night, I did the usual: cool shower before bed, then sleep in the buff. Unfortunately for me, there was something in that batch of laundry that I’m violently allergic to. When I woke up, all parts of me that had touched the sheets were covered in hives.

        So, I went to the convenience store down the street, where I bought every solvent I could think of. Yogurt, cooking oil, cheap liquor, dish soap, even tahini paste. Spent a couple hours in the shower slathering myself with stuff.

        Fortunately I’d had the sense to pack a whole bottle of Benadryl and an extra sheet, because I needed both. Had to get someone else to take the sheets off my bed and get them gone (nobody else reacted, just me) and then had to quarantine that extra sheet and the clothes I went to the store in pre-slather, because enough of whatever it was transferred that I reacted to those also.

      5. PhyllisB*

        This is not contest related, but my grandmother had a cast iron stomach and I presume a Teflon lined mouth because you couldn’t get food too hot for her. (She carried a bottle of Tabasco sauce with her everywhere.) She grew some banana peppers once and if you’ve ever eaten banana peppers you know they’re extremely mild. UNLESS you get a rouge one. She was eating some with her meal one day and got hold of the rouge pepper. She took a bite and her face turned red and she started sweating. It took her a couple of minutes to gasp out “That’s hot!!” Well we all just cracked up. We later apologized for laughing at her misery, but she took it in good grace. She knew that was unusual for her to think anything was too hot. And no, none of us tried it.

      6. Rincewind*

        I remember a NSFW anecdote I heard once about a woman who was cutting jalapenos and then used the bathroom…she only washed her hands /after/. She had to get her husband to run to the store for unsweetened plain yogurt, and apparently it took several explanations to clarify that this was NOT intended as any kind of foreplay and was just a mistake!

        1. Blue Spoon*

          I read a similar story recently involving a guy in chef school who had just finished a class involving hot peppers, some action with his girlfriend before washing his hands, and the eventual use of a gallon of heavy cream.

    4. Kyrielle*

      Not eating, but I feel like people here might enjoy this story. One of our friends asked our friends group if anyone liked hot peppers, as his dad had been given some Carolina Reapers and had no desire to use or eat them. If anyone wanted them, they were available; otherwise they were going to put them down the garbage disposal.

      We suggested that if no one took them, they be put in a ziploc and tossed in the trash, because “aerosolized Carolina Reaper” is a vivid phrase.

      (Someone did want them after a few more folks were asked; the peppers went to an appreciative home.)

      1. ThursdaysGeek*

        I make hot pepper jam, and the last batch had ghost and scorpion. It can be hard to breathe while those things are cooking! (I turn on the fan, open doors and windows, and wear a mask. And sneeze and cough.)

    5. Jackalope*

      Stories like this help me appreciate my life-long determination not to give in to the spiciness competitions. I’ve never liked spicy food (beyond a very minimal level), and found it unpleasant to eat, so I avoided it. Only in recent years have I learned that super spicy food can actually cause harm, like in this story. Glad I missed it!

      (And I of course support those who enjoy spiciness and want to eat spicy food; just as long as they leave me alone with my non-blazing glory, we’re fine.)

    6. Titos and Burritos*

      Actually, the sodas probably would have helped – a sugar water spray is a regularly-used ameliorative for capsaicin burning in food testing and other similar usages. Sugar binds to capsaicin molecules, thus protecting oral tissues from its effects.

      1. Kyrielle*

        May depend on the sodas. Sugar does – what about high fructose corn syrup, or the sweeteners used in diet sodas? Most of the non-diet sodas I see these days are HFCS.

    7. Big Gulps, Huh? Welp, See Ya Later!*

      I will never understand why people will try something for the very first time in their lives by taking a huge, mouth-filling bite or gulp. What if it’s Carolina Reaper hot, or disgusting, or rotten?

      I’m glad you got the dairy you needed.

      Save yourselves and take a tiny bite! AND THEN if you like it, take in more.

      1. Lenora Rose*

        The first time I had wasabi I was politely warned by the person introducing us to sushi to use it sparingly. I took a tiny bit on a single tine of my fork to try it, and was exceedingly grateful he gave the warning.

        Very tasty, too, even if the majority of it in North America is just hot horseradish processed in wasabi style.(And as sushi gets more and more popular, more restaurants seem to serve a tamer version).

        (The plus to horseradish/wasabi heat is that it will blow up your sinuses… then it **goes away**, where capsaicin stays around and yells “come at me, bro!” at your taste buds and intestinal lining alike.)

    1. Antilles*

      The cynic in me suspects that the boss was *never* actually planning on paying up and that’s why he made the rules “exact day” so that he had a much smaller chance of anybody actually hitting the day precisely – and also allow himself plenty of outs to argue over what “melted” means.

      1. Slow Gin Lizz*

        Yeah, I kind of figured that was that case too. Talk about rules-lawyering. But in the right hands, it could be a fantastic contest (barring the cheaters who go out and stomp on the snow or whatever). (Which is a thing I do if we’ve had a snowy winter and I want the dang snowbanks to melt already.)

    2. goddessoftransitory*

      I mean, that was a Stella70 tale, so you know “boss so horrible they deserve a shelf in Hell’s Library” is going to feature.

      1. Sociology Rocks!*

        As I’ve read the comments more and learned so many tales are from the brilliant stella70, I can’t help but wonder A) what myriad of things she has done for a living, and B) what curse or aura or magnetic force is she subject to, that so many fascinating stories have happened to such a good storyteller

  11. Phony Genius*

    On #3, I wonder how long the video was. How long did everybody watching have to sit through it?

    1. Cedrus Libani*

      I forget the exact time limit, but they were short. Maybe 30 seconds. There were forty-something teams that contributed to a half-hour session of video watching.

      Our team was in crunch mode already, so the announcement of this bit of Mandatory Fun was greeted with more hostility from our end than was perhaps strictly deserved. We were mad, though. So we gave the organizers exactly what they asked for: 30 seconds of us doing our jobs, set to Yakety Sax.

      2. Dhaskoi*

        Before you mentioned the song, I pictured it set to ‘Another Brick in the Wall’, which might have been too hostile.

      3. Seeking Second Childhood*

        Yakety sax! I smiled through all of these but just spit my coffee laughing at the delayed punchline.

  12. Dust Bunny*

    #2 Sorry, everyone, but it’s a scientific fact that my younger cat is the cutest thing that has ever existed. Everyone else loses.

    1. desk platypus*

      #2 This made me remember how upset I got my cat didn’t place at my work’s cutest pet contest. There were no prizes and just bragging rights but my good and beautiful child deserved it!! I even submitted my gorgeous cat in his tropical shirt and sunglasses with good lighting. He didn’t even look annoyed! I think the pets who won had more people in their department voting for their close teammates. Their pets were cute but they had no pizzazz.

      I mean, of course I didn’t tell anyone how annoyed I was. Keep those things to yourself and take them to the grave!!

      1. i am a human*

        In the early 200s, my dad submitted a picture of their kitten to Kitten War (SFW if you want to Google – basically an endless head to head voting of kittens). Chester did not win and in fact did not get very high ratings at all. Dad was disgusted about this until the day he died in March of 2023.

          1. The Prettiest Curse*

            I was hoping it would be the 200s, because that would be some truly impressive (internet-predating) grudge-holding. Sorry about your dad, sounds like he was very dedicated to his cat as well as the cat-related grudge.

          2. Fluff*

            We did need the clarification because on this blog we totally understand a vampire holding a kitten grudge for centuries.

        3. Goldenrod*

          “Dad was disgusted about this until the day he died in March of 2023.”

          This is a grudge that I respect. No one disrespects Chester and gets away with it!

      2. Goldenrod*

        “I even submitted my gorgeous cat in his tropical shirt and sunglasses with good lighting”

        YOU WERE ROBBED. I mean, you had me at “his tropical shirt.”

        What kind of monsters don’t vote for a cat in a tropical shirt and sunglasses??

      3. Freya*

        We could never have a cutest pet contest at my workplace because for one reason or another most of us have dogs and they are all the Goodest Boys. Also, the office dog would win, because he is very floofy and parks himself in between the desks and the kitchen so that he can present his tummy for scritching to anyone getting a drink.

      4. Constance Lloyd*

        As a new employee, I was delighted to receive an email announcing the second annual pet Halloween costume contest, complete with a link to view last year’s entries. Reader, it was a phishing test. I should have known the federal government would never be so whimsical.

    2. Indolent Libertine*

      Do you follow “This is best cat and that is science” on Facebook? Total cuteness overload.

  13. Another Kristin*

    People get so worked up about contests at work, don’t they? I once had a woman corner me in the bathroom at a company event, INSISTING that I had cheated at the scavenger hunt I’d just won. The prize? A branded spork. My desk was next to the merch locker, I could have gotten one for her at any time if she’s asked nicely!

    1. A Significant Tree*

      I once went to a company morale-building group’s Trivia Contest, first time I ever attended one of their meetings. It was 80s pop culture trivia and I won by a landslide – the prize was less than $10 of company-branded swag. The atmosphere was … not congratulatory, I guess I was seen as an interloper, and I never attended another meeting.

    1. Paint N Drip*

      I appreciate that commenter for introducing me to Hextris and thus giving me 6 minutes of joy today :)

        1. Seeking Second Childhood*

          I just did some internet sleuhing because my live of zombie flicks is more recent – I’ll be on the hunt for Night of the Comet for the weekend!

  16. Artemesia*

    #9 is gold. Celebrate everyone being forced against their wills back to the office but the managers and C-suite don’t show up because THEY are working from home. I feel for the presented — I have occasionally had a group of people forceably shoved into a program who didn’t want to be there and it is tough to deal with. (was hired one time to work with key evaluation people on some advanced evaluation techniques and analysis tools — and the manager forced a bunch of rank beginners into the workshop so his ‘cost per head’ would be low — but of course they didn’t even now the basics. So fun trying to juggle both groups and of course the guy who hired me got less out of it than he would have if he had left me to work with their advanced group.)

    1. Dhaskoi*

      >I feel for the presented

      Under other circumstances I’d agree with you, but not when the presentation is ‘unions and WFH are *bad*, no really!’

        1. Pinto*

          I think they meant to say the feel for the presenter. And I do too. The contest response is funny. But treating a third party rudely because your management sucks is not something to be celebrated. Seems like some professionalism is needed top to bottom n that organization.

  17. TheBunny*

    The Mayan calendar pyramid over the managers desk was my particular favorite.

    I’m so glad my work does Wellness Week and none of the rest of this.

  18. I'm the Phoebe in Any Group*

    These are entertaining, but it floors me how many companies do this overwhelming Christmas push without a thought about the lack of inclusion. Required Christmas caroling, decorations and contests taking over the office for an entire month, not a thought that some of us might not want to be forcibly bombarded by All Christmas All the Time in our workplace.

    1. Sarahnova*

      where I’m from they call people like Mark in #6 “Elevenerifers”, as in, if you went to Tenerife, they went to Elevenerife.

      1. Slow Gin Lizz*

        Ok, I know that this is a nesting fail, but I love that. Elevenrifers, lol. I have always disliked one-upmanship and have refused to participate in it ever since I was in college and everyone would whine about how little sleep they got last night. After realizing that I never was the person who got the least amount of sleep, I decided that it was irrelevant how little sleep anyone had gotten.

        I loved college and still have life-long friends I met there*, but wow I do NOT miss the sleep deprivation nor the stress.

        * Had lunch today with my college roommate, in fact.

    2. 1 Non Blonde*

      At my last job, the last December I worked there, the Social Committee announced that the large 20’ Christmas Tree would not be put up, but there’d be a display that included most of the popular December holidays. You’d think we’d told my boss we were canceling Christmas all together. “But Carole bought that with her own money—which means WE now own it! It is stored in OUR storeroom-we should put it up ourselves!” Like. Jeebus.

    3. JustaTech*

      Several times my office has done a Christmas cube decorating contest that I would rather skip (I’m a terrible decorator, and at least once I had zero interest in the prize), but was obligated to take part because I was on the social committee.

      So one year I decided to to a Japanese-style Christmas (based on a book I saw once on Reading Rainbow) with paper cranes. Now I know I should have gotten some KFC buckets (Christmas in Japan is a weird and very secular holiday).

  20. Brain the Brian*

    I have to admit I’m a bit confused about #1. If the devs knew where they’d put all the intentional bugs, couldn’t they just “fix” them all — “found” or not? Or were their memories just bad?

      1. Sola Lingua Bona Lingua Mortua Est*

        And having worked closely with testers in the past, they’re human. After they find a certain number of errors, their minds can go numb just as much as anyone else’s would.

        So if your programmer adds 115 “intentional” bugs, and the tester taps out after 70, the end product is going to be… wanting. Especially if there’s pressure to maintain productivity during the time wasting.

    3. Hlao-roo*

      I think three things were happening there:

      1 – devs were only focused on fixing the “planted” bugs so any unintentional bugs were slipping through

      2 – changing the code so many times (to add and then fix the intentional bugs) creates more opportunities for unintentional bugs to pop up

      3 – it’s possible they missed some of their own “planted” bugs if they were creating so many bugs to get higher bonuses they couldn’t/didn’t remember where all of them were

    4. Kimmy Schmidt*

      I assume they spent so much time debugging the intentional mistakes that they forgot to look for the accidental and very real mistakes.

    5. Industry Behemoth*

      I left the IT field ages ago, but still had to get this T-shirt when I saw it.

      99 bugs in the code,
      99 bugs in the code.
      Take one down, patch it up,
      132 bugs in the code.

    6. MigraineMonth*

      I’m assuming the contest was set up so that the developers only got bonuses for fixing bugs that QA found, specifically to avoid a developer making $$ from every typo they fixed 5 minutes later. Unfortunately, QA didn’t catch all the developer-introduced bugs (intentional and unintentional).

      Management didn’t realize that setting up an incentive that rewards fixing bugs would directly lead to the creation of more bugs. This is much like when the British Raj offered a bounty for dead cobras in Delhi, and enterprising locals figured out they could maximize their profits by breeding the snakes.

      1. NotSoRecentlyRetired*

        And the developers couldn’t go in and fix a planted bug without a trouble ticket written up by QA. The only possible solution would be for the coders and QA to be in cahoots and the coders to actually share their planted bug list with QA.
        NAH – not gonna happen! We know the coders didn’t keep a planted bug list.

    1. N C Kiddle*

      When my daughter was younger, she would often complain that the chilli I made was too hot, and I would always clarify “hot in Celsius or hot in Scovilles?”

  23. i am a human*

    I missed this post the first time around but will add mine for some mild amusement. In high school, I worked at a department store. We had regular contests for cashiers to get people to apply for the company credit card. It was one of those deal where the customer could get a discount on their purchase if they applied for a card, even if their application was declined. Because our offers were always changing and signage in the store sometimes didn’t keep up with the current sale, cashiers entered in the amount of the discount during the sale.

    We had one cashier, Danny (sorry if you’re reading this, Danny), who blew everyone else out of the water on applications. We just figured he was a super seller, very slick. After a month or so of Danny regularly getting 5x as many applications, he got fired. Why? Turns out, when the customer said no to the standard 10% or 15% discount, Danny would counter with a higher discount until the customer finally said yes – going as high as 80 or 90%. I legitimately don’t remember what the contest winner got – maybe a close parking spot or a paltry gift card – but I doubt it was worth losing your job over.

  24. Dancing Otter*

    With regard to the spicy food (#5), my BIL – I include it here as a work episode, because as far as we could determine, he had no job other than being married to my sister (cough, leech, cough) – complained that my mother’s cooking was too bland.

    As a Christmas gift, I found a glass jar in the shape of a cowboy boot (He was Texan, and obnoxious about it), and filled it with green jelly bellies.

    Had he opened the card before tossing a huge handful of candy into his mouth, he would have learned that they were not lime but jalapeño flavored. Well, he figured it out on his own quickly enough.

    Had he taken a polite few initially, perhaps it would have elicited a less dramatic reaction.

    “I thought you said you liked spicy food,” with my very sweetest smile and voice.

    We did not hear any more complaints about the food.

    1. Just Another Cog*

      Jerk reminds me of my husband’s very jerky boss back in the 80’s. He recommended a Dim Sum restaurant for dinner one night when the team was at an out-of-town conference. He was a huge braggart and insisted on ordering most of the dishes very spicy. My husband said the waiter rolled his eyes at the order, but brought the dishes with labels as to their heat. The big boss made a huge production of taking large portions of the hottest dishes and wolfed them down. Sweat beads were rolling down his fire engine red face by the time he finished. He then turned around in his chair and barfed up his dinner on the floor behind him.

  25. play stupid games, win stupid prizes*

    #3 reminded me of a stupid contest where I won a digital video camera. After I won the video camera, I was informed that I was now required to make a video about my department. I kept the camera, never made the video, and never used the camera. The camera is now so out of date that it is e-waste.

  26. Adultiest Adult*

    RJ is my hero, and I would have been sitting right next to him with my own book. Hi, ableist speaker, would you like to pay my worker’s comp claim personally when I fall over, or explain to the company why they’re now paying it?

    And the crazy recycled Christmas office hazard is one of the reasons we had to add: nothing may infringe upon the hallway or present a tripping hazard to our door decorating contests! (Following the judges around caroling? Are these people out of their minds?!)

    2. Aggretsuko*

      That was the one that shocked me the most. So petty and cheap to go out and MELT THE SNOW YOURSELF SO NOBODY CAN WIN. WOWZA.

      1. Bossy*

        Sad. And he’s the person who proposed the contest! I feel like if I were working for this person and saw that I’d be disgusted enough to move on as the boss seriously lacks integrity. I likely would’ve leaked the story as well.

  28. Nonanon*

    Hi LW9, if you are still in contact with RJ at all, tell him I love him, and he is officially the only person I respect.
    If the vibe of the story is anything to go by, he will not care, and I respect him more for it.

  29. Holly Jolly Lab*

    The last year we had a locker decorating contest at Christmas I won. The people who usually won became complacent and made really pretty lockers, but about 3 days before the judging, I came in with a box of garland and ornaments I wasn’t using and turned my locker into a Christmas tree from top to bottom. I had lights. I made a star. I made presents out of sparkly paper. I had to figure out how to use more tape when it started to fall off the locker and I did.

    It was magnificent.

    Friends, they were NOT expecting my latent decoration skills and they tried to scramble and up their locker games but it was too late.

    I won first prize. One of the ornaments was shaped like a fish (a stuffed fish wearing pants over its fin) and it fell on the ground in a lab so was not able to come home with me.

    He now lives in research and his name is Peter Pants.

      1. Holly Jolly Lab*

        No, but now I want to find a plush fish pirate with a hook for a fin. Maybe I’ll make one!

  30. Meow*

    in October 2020, I was a bored new mom stuck at home, so I did that instagram thing where you cut leg holes in the bottom of a carved out pumpkin and stuck my 6 month old in it and took pictures. Then my husband’s work had a pumpkin carving contest. So of course we submitted a picture from that shoot. And won. I guess there was a *little* hubbub since while there was carving involved (and we did etch his name on the front too!), it wasn’t exactly something that took a lot of skill. I have zero guilt about it though, I put an awful lot of effort into creating the baby part of that pumpkin and knew I could only capitalize on that kind of thing once.

  31. Aggretsuko*

    My new job apparently goes all out with the cube decorating at Halloween and I cannot wait to see how it goes. (My old job, it was a big deal to finally decorate doors and only a handful would even dress up, and I count “wore cat ears only” as dress up.)

    1. linger*

      “wore cat ears only” presumably intended as “cat ears were the sole concession towards the theme among what Coworker was wearing”, as, at most workplaces, the other meaning really would count as going all out.

  32. Sam*

    I have had several jobs (and friend groups) where if you had asked us to guess when a snow pile would melt it would have turned into almanac-consulting, software-modeling madness

    1. Wolf*

      I work with engineers. It would have been a madness of pouring hot tea on it, piling black stones on it on sunny days, etc.

  33. Storm in a teacup*

    No 10 – is the office in Slough and is there a weird manager called David Brent working there?

  34. Sheworkshardforthemoney*

    We had a Baby Match contest. People submitted pictures of themselves as adults and one as a baby and the person who correctly matched the most photos won a prize. One guy didn’t want to participate so they submitted a picture of his dog as a puppy and one as an adult dog. The contest runners gave him an honourable mention prize of dog treats.

    1. Labracadabrador*

      Are Baby Match contests a common team-building activity? I hadn’t come across the idea in a work setting before (rather than, like, at baby showers). I’m hoping the answer is no?

      2. allathian*

        It happened at my current workplace around 2015 or so. It was fully opt-in on my team so I didn’t bring photos but the people who did seemed to enjoy it. I wasn’t the only one who opted out, either. I had no particular reason to opt out but I just don’t enjoy participating in things like this.

        I think contests like that are tone deaf at best. Where’s the fun in it for the only POC on the team? Or what if someone’s a fairly recent immigrant and doesn’t have any photos of themselves as a baby? Or grew up in extreme poverty or had an abusive or otherwise deprived childhood and doesn’t have any photos of themselves? Or someone’s a trans man and all the baby pics are of him in a dress?

        It’s easy to say where’s the harm when the whole team consists of people of the dominant ethnicity who grew up in middle class or upper middle class homes where baby pics were popular as early as the 1950s, if not earlier.

        1. ElliottRook*

          I hope the practice dies off, or at the very least the etiquette for it to be opt-in only is very strict; required participation could absolutely out a trans, nonbinary, or GNC person. As a nonbinary person, I don’t want to be forced to share a photo of when my family was dressing me. (My wife works with a trans man who did happily participate in one of these, however, some of the team knew him pre-transition, and as I understand it he was able to find a photo where his baby clothes were fairly nondescript and not triggering to share. That simply wouldn’t be the case for everyone, though!)

        2. amoeba*

          Yeah, I mean, this kind of thing could be fun and innocuous with friends, when you actually know the people and there’s also no pressure to participate. At work? Nah.

          (Although I’m always a little surprised by the gender thing – pretty much all of my baby photos until age, like, 2 or so are very gender-neutral! I feel like Germany in the late 80s mostly just had colourful everything for everybody and the whole pink/blue thing got much worse in recent years. And I certainly didn’t have enough hair yet for that to be a giveaway…)

      3. Carmina*

        We had one – top management pictures only, and it was an icebreaker at a townhall. Easier to match the only two women of course.
        Management themselves did not participate, so no unfair advantage there. I don’t think anyone cared much either way? I don’t think there was an actual prize to be won, just the glory of your name displayed.

  35. Rain, Disappointing Australian (formerly Lucien Nova)*

    As someone who adores extremely spicy food, and whose main complaint about the One Chip Challenge is that the spice powder tastes FOUL (it’s just heat and a bitter medicinal taste, no flavour!), even I’d be careful with that stew.

    I’d probably then down an entire bowl of it. But I still would test it first!

    (And now I want spicy stew. Dang it. :D)

    1. Jopestus*

      High five! I am a known leadthroat as well and I always have either buttermilk or sugar next to a new thing if I am told it will be spicy.

      I have burned myself a lot of times and I bet I will keep doing so. At least in the day after.

  36. I'm great at doing stuff*

    I’ve got to hand it to #7 with the pumpkins. I mean, you did what she asked! Slow clap.

  37. I don't mean to be rude, I'm just good at it*

    I was new to a school although a veteran high school teacher. A colleague was one of those gushing with enthusiasm recent college graduate in her second year of teaching (not jaded yet) suggested our department do a door decoration contest.

    The jaded old veterans of the classroom wars sighed and did what our department head requested and I decorated my door with dozens of images of Jim Morrison and the Doors.

    The kids had no clue, my department head growled but most of my colleagues enjoyed it.

  41. Captain dddd-cccc-ddWdd*

    OP1 (bug bounty) – this seems different from the rest of the stories, in that most of them have harmless or at least not long-term outcomes, but deliberately sabotaging the company’s code causing a loss of reputation with customers is pretty serious. It isn’t clear whether the developers were in cahoots with QA but either way — I’m in this field and if this was found out, the developers (and QAs if they were in on it) would have been fired. I like a good prank and I’m pretty competitive and occasionally ‘obtuse’ myself, and attuned to unintended incentives, but I would never do this. Shame on those developers who clearly have no professional pride.

    1. perstreperous*

      The manager who authorised this “competition” should be the one fired, although I’m surprised that the developers/testers didn’t object (maybe they did and were overruled or ignored).

      Deliberately putting bugs in code that would be released to the live environment with the expectation that they would all be discovered before release is (almost) too improbable to believe.

  43. ElliottRook*

    #8–I love Halloween but I would not have been able to resist the temptation of sending in a photo of myself in an N95. Maybe I would’ve decorated it but still.

  45. Michelle*

    This wasn’t a workplace competition, but in the early 90s I was responsible for one particular Girl Scout summer camp implementing a “one milk per girl per meal” rule. Let’s just say I started drinking my peers under the table at an early age.

  48. Frango Mint*

    The government agency I worked at had a yearly promotion for the United Way charities. Various speakers from different charities would be invited to speak and employees were pushed into making donations to the United Way.
    One year upper management decided to have a contest among the different floors for which unit could raise the most money.. This was separate from the individual donations we were expected to give. Our unit decided to have a theme: “Give until it hurts”. There were bake sales and dart throwing contests for garage-sale quality prizes. Folks made posters using the image of a professional clown as the face of the United Way, peering in bedroom windows, hospital delivery room, natural disasters: United Way is everywhere! Our unit didn’t win the prize for money raised, but it was a lot of fun. Management wisely ignored the snarky attitude because the employees were so entertained.

Comments are closed.