It’s “Team Shirt Day” at work!

It started out as “OSU vs. Michigan Shirt Day”. Here in Columbus, Ohio, people get really worked up about OSU vs. Michigan. By “people” I mean “hicks” and by “hicks” I mean “hicks who didn’t even attend OSU.” This game is extremely important. So important that HBO did a documentary about it where some middle-aged man dressed in imitation of OSU’s infamous player-punching coach Woody Hayes went on a rant about “A Wolverine… is a motherfucker!” My brother has written about people like this before and I have very little or nothing to add to his opinions.

My contract employer has decided that the “business casual” image required of its employees is unnecessary as long as there’s going to be an important football game during the upcoming weekend. This is the sort of thing I’ve never understood. Either we should dress for business all the time, or we should dress for business never. Since the possibility of my ever meeting an actual customer of the company is precisely zero, I think it should be never. Don’t get me wrong. I like to wear Armani or Brioni suits as much as the next man. More than the next man, really, since I actually buy that stuff and nobody else in Ohio does. But I don’t see the point of making everybody wear Dockers and a polyester polo shirt at work, unless the point is to prop up the Chinese textile industry. If we’re never going to be in a position where we represent the company to external clients, there is no reason to “dress up” whatsoever.

You’ll never get anywhere attempting to apply external concepts of logic and reason to corporate behavior, however, so it’s best to just go along with it. Luckily for me, someone who was less inclined to go along than I was complained to management that this “OSU v. Michigan Shirt Day” is discriminatory towards people who favor neither team. I assume there was a sharp intake of breath on the part of some thirty-something HR woman as she considered the concept of people having no affiliation in this titanic contest of third-tier schools. Why, that’s as crazy as people not having a favorite Jason Aldean record!

After some consideration, The Company Decided that you could wear the shirt of any team that struck your fancy. I’d like to say that I promptly purchased the above “Centipede Swat Team” shirt and wore it to work today, but I didn’t want to spend the $28.99. Instead, I just wore an old Atari shirt. I am a member of Team Atari, assuming the other team is Team ColecoVision. I hate the fucking ColecoVision with a passion and have done so ever since they got that port of Zaxxon that was supposed to be so awesome.

You know what? Zaxxon sucks. As a game. As an arcade game. And more so on the suck-tastic ColecoVision and its suck-tastic controllers with the little disc on top. Team Atari 4 LYFE. That’s the set I’m claiming, yo.

About fifteen years ago, I had a chance to work with one of the all-time great UNIX system administrators. He’s currently a RedHat employee so I won’t use his actual name here. Let’s call him Mike, shall we? Mike and I worked for this janky-ass consulting company that was infamous for lying to customers and sending unqualified people on projects and just generally squeezing every drop of potential profit out of every situation regardless of the long-term implications involved.

The owners of the company were obsessed with the idea of getting us to identify as employees of said company as opposed to contractors of an anonymous “body shop” on-site with a succession of unpleasant clients. They sent us weekly emails about the company’s customers and success stories, which I promptly deleted. They made the young and female client reps stop flashing their breasts at middle managers with modest purchase authorizations long enough to hold “team lunches”, which I skipped. They sent us all sorts of items branded with the company logo, which I promptly threw in the trash. About once every ninety days they’d hold some sort of all-hands meeeting somewhere to brag about their upcoming IPO. These meetings were unpaid so I always pretended to be sick.

At one of these meetings, one of the company owners asked Mike, “What can we do to get you more excited about [INSERT COMPANY NAME HERE]. Would you like more trips to amusement parks? More lunches with the reps? More button-down shirts with the company logo?” Mike, as a rule, did not enjoy talking to people. He especially did not like talking to scumbags like the owner in question. So he paused for a moment and then he said,

“Just pay me. Pay me more. Take the money for the meetings and the parties and the gifts and the trips and give my share to me in cash. I don’t want to see you, I don’t want to hang out with you, I don’t want to spend time with other [COMPANY] personnel. I want to spend time with my wife and children. Every moment I spend not doing that is either paid time or wasted time. Pay me more and don’t ever invite me to one of these things again.”

Naturally, they honored his second request by inviting him to hit the road. In so doing, they lost one of the true stars in the tech business. Which is okay. I’m sure RedHat is happy to have him. I bet they pay him pretty well, too.

Mike was too socially awkward and too honest to understand that what he said touched the third rail of reality in corporate life. There are plenty of people who love working in the corporate environment and love being part of a “team”. My brother is one of those people. He is a team-builder and he is a team member and he’s a team player.

For many other people, including myself, working in corporate America is as degrading and depressing as turning tricks behind a McDonalds in the broad daylight. I could no more get excited about doing tech work in an office than I could get excited about mowing the lawn or watching a football game. I don’t bring excitement to my clients. What I bring is exceptional experience, competence, ability, and results. If those things aren’t your “hot buttons”, don’t hire me.

I’m not on your team.

I’m on Team Atari.

And Team Atari…

sing it with me…

expects to get paid.