Shut Up and Sing

We didn’t enter the company talent show to win. We didn’t enter to prove anything. We didn’t even enter to meet chicks. We entered because there frankly isn’t a whole lot of call for the kind of stuff we sing, and hey, man, a gig is a gig.

It was all about raising money for United Way. That was the corporate line. Not that I doubt it. My employer, Infamous Megamultinational Corporation, has about a zillion irons in the fire, and not all of them are about making money. A glance at the past several years’ stock price performance proves that but even so, people like to help people, and if the mighty Corporation can support its people in helping people and get some good P.R. and maybe a tax break or two, then they are there, they are on task, they are resourced, lines up, ready to go. Organizers stepped up to organize, promoters stepped up to promote, talent stepped up to be talented, and everyone was given the green light to volunteer all the out-of-hours time they needed to get the job done.

So to ramp up and draw attention to the fund drives, they had a talent show. Loosely based on some TV show I’ve never seen with "Idol" in the title but that I’m familiar with because of the end of that Shrek movie, it was MC’d by an employee with a knack for public wisecracking and judged by three more employees with a knack for … Well, they were game. Give ‘em credit for that. Over a dozen acts appeared out of the employee pool, people with some honest to goodness ability and a willingness to shame themselves in front of their co-workers, employees, and potential hiring managers. Give them credit too. Risk-taking is one of the Corporate Values by which we are exhorted to live our work lives. Given that when it comes to public musical performance, the less the talent, the greater the risk, some of the performers truly took that particular value to heart.

For our part, it wasn’t about risk, and it wasn’t so much about United Way. It was about singing. Here was a place to do it, with an audience and microphones and everything. How could we resist? Let’s be honest, raising money for charity and all is great, but for creative types, the play’s the thing, or the book, or the song. So here’s our song.



Did it last year too. I think I mentioned it in the old blog (since extinct). We never saw a vid of ourselves, never got any useful feedback, and I think it shows. Besides, we're a bunch of engineers. But you know what? Fun! That's what.



Second from right in the first one and far right in the second one, that's me.