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Sep 23, 2024

Lost in Elevation: Ditched by the Office at an Off-Site

Memo madness in the mountains!

By Ed Goldman

Memos From Hell” is the first chapter of my first book, “How to Incorporate Your Dog (and Other Solid Business Tips).” Published in 1986 and long out of print, it contained my opinion of office “retreats,” which I summarized roughly as follows:  

Your reward for spending all week with people you can barely tolerate at the office is being forced to spend a wilderness weekend with them. You’ll still have meetings of course, but this time you’ll be encouraged to wear flannel shirts.

Edgy Cartoon

Rinse and retreat

I was reminded of this when I read late last month that some poor guy got separated from his office mates on a mountain-hiking retreat—and his co-workers left him behind. Can you imagine?

Unlike still-whining adults in their 30s and up whose parents split up when the whiners were nine years old, the guy ditched by his office mates will have a very legitimate right to claim he has “abandonment issues” for the rest of his life.

And it wouldn’t surprise me to learn that the theme of this corporate-goes-rustic event was “team-building.” Some team.

Now, all of us at some point in our lives have been left behind. It could have been when our junior high school coach was selecting the starting-team for the softball season and we didn’t make the cut—though we were kept as “benchwarmers,” which meant we’d probably never get to play but our parents would get soaked for buying us the team uniform anyway.

It could have happened to us under decidedly tragic circumstances, naturally, like losing our spouses, parents, siblings or, for some of us, the wallet card that contained all of our internet passwords.

It may happen again when the Rapture occurs and the date you were really hoping to get to know after dinner is suddenly sucked out of his or her seat and up through the roof of the bistro, crashing that glass ceiling at last but leaving you and a group of agnostics behind to pick up the tab. (If you’re lucky, you and your date got only as far as “starters” so that plate of fried zucchini won’t set you back too badly. Pity the poor schnooks who’d just finished dessert and a very expensive bottle of port when their guests ascended.)

Okay, let’s head to the hills. As CBS News reported, “A man who was left behind on a Colorado mountain while on (a) hiking retreat with coworkers was rescued by emergency services. The man, who has not been named, was part of a group of 15 people hiking Mount Shavano, a 14,000-foot mountain in the southern Rocky Mountains. All 15 were coworkers participating in an office retreat and were taking … an 11-mile hike.”

Let’s make two observations before we go any farther (or higher): 

  1. Someone in the company’s HR department is going to be in a rubble of trouble. I don’t care if he or she got those 15 employees to fill out hold-harmless liability waivers in advance. If the participants weren’t checked to see if they had blood pressure issues or next-of-kin advance directives  before they were allowed to go an 11-mile hike at a high altitude, that HR gal or guy’s next “other duties as assigned” will likely include graveyard-shift janitorial work. At the firm’s branch office in Balaboo, Wisconsin.
  2. Fourteen-thousand feet is very high—especially if, like me, you used to get dizzy when you were taller. My point is that unless this company’s employees are alpinists, skydivers or ibexes, a guy simply getting lost would be among the least of the company’s worries. How about the potential for Red Sea-style nosebleeds, snow-blindness or being kidnapped by a Sasquatch?

Finally, is a company “retreat” so-named because the word means “relaxing getaway”—or does it mean, “I give up, I hate every single one of you!”? My instincts tell me the latter.

Ed Goldman's column appears almost every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. A former daily columnist for the Sacramento Business Journal, as well as monthly columnist for Sacramento Magazine and Comstock’s Business Magazine, he’s the author of five books, two plays and one musical (so far).