The girl planning this thing was the same one who planned our stellar trip to Qiandao Lake, which I still haven’t blogged about. For our CNY deal, she basically she rented out this like private recreation area that was part of an apartment complex. To give her some credit, it was really nice. They had a really nice pool, workout area, area to play cards and probably a slew of other things I didn’t notice. The only problem was that nothing was organized – we just showed up and did whatever we wanted.
Not that having an afternoon to just mess around this place was worse than being in an office, but when I think of “company events” I tend to think that they should be something you to together, like with your coworkers. My colleagues, although very nice, can be painfully cliquey. So not organizing an activity for everyone to do together only reinforced this cliquiness.
I was talking about it with the other laowais and we were all in agreement that there are a lot of cool things to do in Shanghai as a group – bowling, paint balling, go-karting, roller skating, etc. Hanging out at this oddly located apartment clubhouse was not on our list of “cool.” It would have at least been nice to do something together with all the coworkers. A scavenger hunt, perhaps, where you actually get to meet with people from the other departments.
Side note: There is little to no mixing between the different departments, at least in editorial. And I don’t think it’s because editorial and advertising/marketing have the same kind of strained relationships as they do in “real” publications – you know when the advertising department wants the writer to write about this instead of that because this is a potential/current advertiser.
Anyway, it was a nice treat to get out of the office, but I thought it would have been a little more of bonding with the staff rather than “forced fun.” But I guess I like forced fun. I mean, they’re forcing me to have fun, so I have to have fun, right?
No comments:
Post a Comment