Please, Stop With the Corporate Cheerleading Already

I love corporate cheerleaders! They provide endless amusement when I’m having a boring day at work. A corporate cheerleader can be anyone, male or female, who goes around the office singing praises of the company. You can’t even stop to ask this person how their day is going without getting an earful about changes to management policy, or new distribution nodes, and how it’s all wonderful or something of that sort.

The place where the corporate cheerleader really shines, however, is in meetings. At my last job, once a year everyone in management would be sent to this “retreat” for a week to relax and socialize or whatever, but they were actually being pumped full of new propaganda to come back and disseminate. (note: even though I was in management, I always scheduled really important stuff during that week so I never had to go. Can you imagine being surrounded by management-level corporate cheerleaders for a week straight? They’re hilarious in small doses but competely intolerable after more than about 5 minutes). Anyway, after one such “retreat,” we were all in a meeting together, and the best corporate cheerleader I’ve ever seen in my life made the following comment (italics added on the words she emphasized):

“One of the things that leadership mentioned last week that really
hit home for me was when they said, ‘before you make any decisions,
think to yourself: ‘how does this benefit the company?‘
When they said that, I was just like *gasp* [at this point she put
her fist up against her heart], ‘wow! That’s so meaningful!'”

I wish I were making this up. It was literally like that scene in Office Space, which made it ten times more hilarious than it would have been if she had just gone on with some normal corporate cheer.

I bet at night they sleep in pajamas emblazoned with the company logo.