Tongue-in-Cheek: Despair.com
I was browsing through the pile of junk mail delivered to my home last Saturday when one unsolicited catalog caught my eye. The somber gray cover depicted a depressing, long corridor in a warehouse filled with plastic-wrapped pallets of floor-to-ceiling boxed inventory. A large poster, hanging from the ceiling in the middle of the aisle, said, "FIGHT workplace demotivation: FIRE unhappy employees". Intrigued, I opened the cover and discovered the world of Despair, Inc.
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Despair, Inc. is a company in the Austin, Texas founded by a 39-year-old PhD who is apparently making a decent living spoofing the ubiquitous motivational posters and plaques that sometimes substitute for effective management in today's business world. The slick paper and colorful illustrations mimic the look and feel of a serious catalog, but with the added bonus that virtually every page is filled with sardonic humor.
My personal favorite is the poster of clasped hands with the caption, "Meetings: None of Us is as Dumb as All of Us". Those sentiments reminded me sitting through interminably long management meetings that ate up days at a time without accomplishing anything tangible. Another that struck a chord was, "Motivation: If a Pretty Poster and a Cute Saying Are All It Takes to Motivate You, You Probably Have a Very Easy Job. The Kind Robots Will Be Doing Soon."
The web site www.despair.com is filled with provocative press releases, ironic news articles, and posters, note cards, sticky pads, and even Valentine's Day candies featuring these slogans and dozens of others. In view of the tremendous changes in health care reimbursement we have all endured over the past decade, I thought their sentiments on "Change" were particularly apropos: "When the Winds of Change Blow Hard Enough, Even the Most Trivial of Things Can Turn Into Dangerous Projectiles". Despair, Inc. also has a selection of decals to place near the feeder slot in the paper-shredding machine, renaming it "Employee Suggestions" or "Enron Document Storage". If you're feeling skeptical about the value of pop psychology in the workplace or just in a dour mood, browsing through the tongue-in-cheek world of Despair.com may be just enough to bring a faint smile to your face!
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