Stress-Balls

We have a group of people at office who organize all these 'feel good' activities so that the average employee thinks our office is a great place to work in. Recently, we got an email which mentioned that this team would be giving away a surprise gift to all employees. Later that afternoon, these people came around, giving away yellow smiley-faced stress balls to everyone with a noble smile on their face and all, as if they were feeding a thousand kids at some goddam orphanage.

All this was pretty much okay, and I was feeling pretty neutral about this whole business, when I realised they were cross-checking from a list whether a particular employee had already received a stress ball or not. I mean, here they were, 'donating' stress balls to everyone, smiling widely and all, as if they found no better joy in life than giving away stress balls to everyone, only to turn around, stone-faced (add a few more of those 'cold, steely' things that Roger Waters keeps talking about in his songs), to tick against someone's name in a goddam list.

The goddam icing on the cake was when these guys took photos of employees when they were accepting these stress balls, and when I say that, I mean these guys took photos of employees exactly when they were accepting these stress balls, you know, both of them in contact with the stress ball in the photo. And going by the preciseness of the moment at which the photo was taken and considering the fact that there was no motion blur in any of the photos, it only means that they actually posed for this.

Posing for photos. That's gotta be the phoniest thing you can ever do. You may argue that photos are good if, twenty years later, you wish to look at them and see how happy you were and 're-live those happy moments' or some other happy-shit reason, but then, from a logical standpoint, I think it's pretty pointless. You may become happy after you've transported yourself to the past, but when you transport yourself back to the present, you're left feeling more melancholic than before.

Anyway, coming back, I had no clue that photos were taken until we got an email the next day with a link to the photos. People smilingly giving away smiley-faced stress balls, and people smilingly accepting them. I had to go out for a short stroll to kind of get back to normal after seeing them photos. I was secretly happy they didn't ask me to pose for a photo or something. I might have had this grim expression of impending doom, or might have 'accidentally' shown a finger or something.

People, I tell you. They're always making a big deal out of things like stress-balls. Try telling them this, and they'll give you some lame, shot-to-shit crap about little things like this making life interesting or making a difference or something.

PS: Couldn't resist posting this photo of an over-stressed colleague's stress-ball.

Random Question: What do stress-balls do when they are over-stressed?