May 17th, 2025
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Things have been going well at the office recently and everyone’s making a shit ton of money so morale has been way up. we've started doing a handful of different group activities with the coworkers and managers included. We have a tradition of going out to eat or for drinks once a month but usually no one goes. then after the new policies kicked in, it’s been like full attendance (except a few people with toddlers) and weekly instead of monthly. Then we started a company game of golf every week. A few groups of guys were even running and working out on the lunch break and others before and after work. In short we just became a unit instead of a bunch of drones who hated each other.
But recently, we started doing something that has taken the office by storm: fish racing, specifically betting on fish racing. It started as a joke because a few people in the office had fish in fishbowls but we realized if we bought a tank and different colored fish we could race them. So every Friday we everyone would purchase fish from the pet store the night before and after work we would all stay late and crack open some beers and start betting.
I’ve always been kinda weirded out by it since we burn through fish very quickly (slower ones are put in a separate tank that was at first just tapwater) but I chill there without betting. I have been gunning for a promotion and my direct supervisor is a good ol boy who promotes based on whether you “get it.”
Tonight was especially off and I don’t know if I can do another Friday. It started with Greg, an autistic engineer who works at a different office suite in the building but is cool with all of us, betting correctly on 15/16 of the preliminary races, which he does every time pretty much (it’s uncanny) but tonight he was like hoisted up in a chair as if it were at a bar mitzva when he hit 10/10 but he got overstimulated and had basically a meltdown. then a guy who was already really pissed an hour into the night (I think he had started drinking at lunch) poured a miller high life into the losers tank “to make it interesting.” I told him that he should probably pour out all the water at that point and go get more from the market and he laughed in my face. So I went.
When I came back I saw that there was a shit ton of floaters in the loser tank and the guys were filling out their cups from it. They said they turned the tank into “jungle juice with protein.”
I don’t have a wife so now I’m at home sitting with all this and no one to tell it to. I’m close to a tipping point here and guessing you will all want me to file a complaint or quit, but I have been job searching and any position equivalent to this I would be making 100k less (250k less with promotion) so my hands are pretty much tied.
May 17th, 2025
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