Why is corporate America so soul-less?

I grew up in the UK where humor is king. the ability to make a funny observation is sometimes more important than getting an attaboy or being a "team member". Being seen by your colleagues as a bit of a "maverick" was a good thing. Or at least entertaining.

When I came to the USA (from Denmark) my first jobs were at the bottom of the corporate food chain - if there is corporate "krill" I was one of them - and any smart comments I made were either confined to the Security shack I was manning or the inside of my beaten up car delivering the Rocky Mountain News at 3 in the morning.

Gradually I worked my way into better jobs. Bought myself a PC, improved my abilities on it, got used to using email and IRC and Usenet (dating meself a tad there) and I finally landed a decent paying Security job at Quark Inc in Denver. And I found an outlet for humor in April Fools emails. Fortunately Quark was privately owned by Tim Gill and Fred Ebrahimi and as long as I didn't run afoul of either of them I was safe. (Turned out that Tim had a great sense of humor and a fine appreciation of the absurd) added to that was a great workforce who got to be my first audience and who seemed to enjoy it.

In the my first foray into April Fools' jokes I found out that IT keep a large box of borken mice in one of their cupboards. So I went and "borrowed" the box early in the morning of April 1st and I went round each of the floors that of the 8 story building that Quark used and I seeded a few computers on each floor by hiding the mouse that was there and leaving a broken mouse on the desk without actually connecting it to the computer, I just trailed the connector out of sight behind the computer.

Sweetness. All the pro users who experienced it did exactly what I thought would happen. They tried to click the mouse, nothing happened and eventually they would reboot. Only to find that the mouse still did not work. Sent out the email and laughs all round (well except for the help desk person from IT who got a lot of irritated calls)

I was so ready for the next year ... we had experienced some elevator issues in the early part of the next year and people had been griping a bit and so my next piece was set...

I sent out an email on the 31st March deliberately avoiding using the date of the next day. I explained that "everyone knew" that work had been being done on the elevators and had finally been finished and that voice activated controls had been installed. All that was needed in order to make it work was for a user to get in and recite Mary Had a Little Lamb so there voice pattern would be recognized for the first time and then firmly announce their desired floor.

I should mention here that Tim Gill the person who wrote the original code for QuarkXpress and the co-owner of the company was a HUGE fan of Star Trek - The Next Generation and the audience (the staff) were pretty much a bunch of sci-fi and geeky enthusiasts.

Ah the next morning as the staff came in - as cries of "Mary had a little Lamb" ""4th floor" rang out and questions liker "will it make a difference if I have a cold?' came by email. the reception area and security desk were the place to be!

From there for the next few years there were others - the invisible dust trail left my the die from a bank robber, the complicated schedule for raising and lowering the blinds to compensate for solar heating and reducing the strain on the A/C system Free tickets to the Airforce and Air national guard practicing take offs and landings on the I-70/I25 interchange. I am sure some of the connections I have on LinkedIn will remember some of those.

I left Quark in 2003 and eventually ended up at a place that had a real corporate environment. I was working in IT by that point. One of my main responsibilities was sending out e-mails to the company if there were outages or common issues needing to be addressed. I had developed a modus operandi having worked online for a number of years, that people were much more amenable to reading an "official" email if there was something interesting, surprising or original to get their attention.

In my new environment I developed a habit of trying to find an appropriate quote (from Shakespeare usually, though I used Keats and Edgar Allen Poe as needed). There was a change in the management and I was (in a friendly way I hasten to add) informed that doing it that way was no longer the way that it was to be done. I love my job and where I work so I did as asked.

Sigh. I still think that humor, quirkiness, cheeky banter have a spot in customer service. But I think I may be in a majority of one.