About a decade ago I worked for a vehicle finance company that every year for Halloween encouraged each department to come up with a theme, decorate their area, and dress in costume to be judged by upper management for a prize that I think was five "Denim Day" passes, allowing you to wear jeans any day of the week.
I worked in the Records Administration Department (a.k.a. the File Room) my first Halloween with the company. Records Admin was one of four smaller departments, which along with Titles, Call Center and Document Services, made up the Customer Service Division. It was our choice to decide if Customer Service as a whole wanted to compete as one large team, or if the four smaller departments wanted to do their own thing. We in the Records division decided to do our own thing that year...The Wizzard of Oz. We had just the right number of people to make up all the main characters, and as far as anyone could remember, it wasn't something that any other department had done in years past, so it was perfect for us.
A few days after we had started making our plans, the Call Center manager approached me and asked if we would like to join her team for the contest. I told her about our plans, and that we wouldn't be interested in joining her group. But she loved our "Wizzard of Oz" idea so much more that what her department had been brainstorming about. She said, "That's such a great idea! Can we be a part of it too?" I explained that we had already been working hard on our plans and had all the main characters assigned. I said that if her group wanted to participate with us, they would end up being munchkins, Emerald City residents or flying monkeys. She said, "We don't care! We just want to participate!"
So she asked me to send an email to everyone in the Customer Service Division assigning everyone their parts. And it was just minutes after I hit that "Send" button that I started getting angry emails back. People saying things like, "Who the hell do you think you are, telling me that I'm going to be a flying monkey?!" I guess when the Call Center manager had told me that no one would care what they were dressed as...she hadn't actually confirmed that information with everyone.
So in response to the vicious emails I was getting, I went to talk it over with the Call Center manager, to let her know that her people were NOT happy about the decision that she'd made for them. Her response to me was, "Well your email was pretty blunt. I don't think that was really the best way to go about it. You probably should have asked people if they wanted to participate and if they were willing to be extra characters."
That was SO not what she had said before! WTF?! So now I look like an asshole and everyone hates me.
It probably goes without saying that we called the whole thing off. I was getting dirty looks and the cold shoulder from quite a few customer service members for the next couple of weeks. My Records department had talked about whether or not we still wanted to go through with our original plan of just us main characters, but we decided that would probably just piss people off even more.
I was so irritated about the whole situation that I took Halloween as a vacation day that year, and every year after that. I never found out what my department, or what the rest of Customer Service ended up doing that day...if anything at all. And ever since then, my standard answer to any Halloween related question is, "I don't do Halloween."
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