2006 NYC Employee Winter Olympics

As the Winter Olympics are currently taking place in Turin(sorry, Torino), it occurred to me that they are not much different from the rat race of the American office environment.

Every day presents a challenge, as employees strategize on how to outwit their colleagues and go to excessive lengths to one-up each other. By denying workers their basic rights and allotting them only 2 weeks of paid time off per year, you too can create an Olympic environment of competition, scandal, and backbiting!

And now I present to you the categories for the 2006 Employee Winter Olympics:

Speed bitching - Two employees (usually female) run in circles around the office to bitch about their competition. The one who can slander the worst, turn the most people against the other, and ruin their professional reputation faster, wins. Weight and appearance are fair game.

Long distance sitting - The employee who comes in the earliest and stays the latest at work wins. This person then holds the bragging rights about how late they were at their desk after everyone left, regardless of actual work accomplished and how many games of Solitaire won.

Freestyle blaming - When something goes wrong in the office, the most creative method of passing the buck to another individual gets the highest marks. “It’s totally Fiona’s fault. And if she doesn’t know what you’re talking about, it’s because of stress-induced amnesia from trying to cover it up. It's a side effect from 'Nam.”

Budget ducking - This category is for employees who can expense the most meals at Campagnola and lap dances at Scores, without management batting an eye. For ideas, past winners have:

- cited an LV Speedy as a protective carrier bag for their work-issue laptop
- expensed 20 gallons of Ben & Jerry's Chunky Monkey to keep the hypoglycemia at bay during work hours
- been reimbursed for daily hour-long phone calls to their mother in Kazakhstan, who is a world renown expert on corporate information technology and goat-herding

Lunch asceticism – The most steadfast employee, who works through the most federally mandated lunch hours, obtains the honor of being Holiest-Than-Thou. At noon, when you run out to do quick errands or to go get lunch, the winner can hold their stomach while protesting in the name of The Office, they have too much work to do to perform the act of food consumption.

Holiday two-facing - The employee who can best confuse everyone by spreading the holiday cheer - i.e. chocolates on Valentine's Day, candy eggs on Easter- while being the most miserable human being alive on other days, is always highly regarded by our esteemed panel of judges!

Death slalom - otherwise known as the Bruce Willis Unbreakable category. The employee who takes the least amount of sick time off, preferably none at all, is the undisputed winner. This intrepid employee who comes in and infects the rest of the office with influenza, forcing them all to stay home, should be immediately recommended for a promotion. Overall productivity be damned, it's every man for himself!

A side-by-side category with the above is the Vacation Volley, where contenders fight to maintain the highest visibility and brownie points by refusing to take their personal time off. Should you end the year with the most extra days off that can't be carried over to the next fiscal year, you win! You also reserve the right to instill guilt in any employee who took their time off for holiday, surgery, tending to their sick child, or for bereavement. Tans are frowned upon and grieving is for sissies.

Endurance e-mailing - Points are awarded to the individual who totals the most pointless e-mails, to the exclusion of any face-to-face interaction with other members of their 'team' that sit twenty feet away. By generating the biggest time suck since watching NBC's time-delayed, primetime coverage of the Games- when the results have been posted on the Web hours ago- you're going for Gold, baby!

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The Employee Olympics are a constantly evolving and mercurial arena, as are the categories; contributions and suggestions for categories are most welcome. Good luck to the competitors! My own colleagues are quite formidable contenders, but maybe there is in fact someone you know who can outwit them all. May the biggest hypocrite win!