Company Retreat from Hell

wearing a hat. Do you see this hat? It's a cool hat, isn't it? I'll be taking no further questions. Do you see this right here? Does this look like fun to you? Do are you having some sort of hopes of being able to go to this place? Well, guess what? Don't have that because this is actually a horrible, horrible place. And no fun was had at all. Or apparently I'm lying to you and it was super awesome. What you just saw there was some video from the Plex Offsite. If you have not heard about the Plex Offsite, this one is legendary. has gone down as single-handedly the worst offsite ever. And if you've been a part of tech, you've been on some pretty weird offsites. I know you have because I have. Uh just on a little side note, one time on a offsite, our team got together and said, "Hey, let's go play paintball." Now, here's the deal. The two teams that went and played paintball, we were kind of at odds with each other, okay? We spent months being like, "Those sons of always do this." And then they're like, "Hey, let's go play paintball." So, of course, we show up to paintball. I can't wait to shoot him. And then one person, you know, this happens every single time. Everybody gets like the default rifle from the paintball place that kind of just, you know, just doesn't really shoot straight at all. And then one son of a in that area always comes in. He's like, "Yo, bro, I brought my own paintball gun. Hopefully nobody minds." It's just like, "What the hell is this gameplay?" Anyways, that same guy shot him right in the hand. Okay, he was giving somebody some sort of Seal Team Six signs. shot him right in the hand. Got him out. So, I've had my fair share of kind of these rowdy tech adventures. You know, in my later life, most of them just ended at a winery where I had one too many grape drinks. But anyh who, we're going to be talking about the most legendary of all work trips of all time. This has to be number one. But before we begin, I got to get the bag. My startup, DailyBj.ai, is going nuclear. Congratulations on product market fit. Sorry I called you the Diffler. I knew you weren't the Diffler. I always thought I was the intern with the weird glasses. You should have seen his coat. But anyways, if you want to get on the ground floor of this thing, I'm taking Angel Investments. So, you finally cracked the case. Merge cop. You put the white space in the diff. You made the synthetic traffic. You made me approve that PR. You're the diff and I always knew it. You've merged your last PR, Diffler. I already clicked merge on my PR 35 seconds ago. Huh? My merge is blocked. CURSE YOU, CODE RABBIT. You saved the city from a code review related crime. Thanks, Kamish. Well, technically it was Code Rabbit that saved the day. Not only do they have advanced AI features that can detect security vulnerabilities like what the Diffler was trying to merge, they also have ways to enforce styling, linting, and a variety of other tools. And so you can stop wasting time reviewing code that humans don't need to review. You can try it yourself at code rabbit.ai. So, Merge Cop, I would say it's a little misleading to say you did it all by yourself. Huh? Would you like some cake? Oh, sure. Thanks. Welcome back. So, this is how the Daily Beast describes this trip. Survivor style corporate retreat descends into hellish nightmare. Of course, the corporation we're talking about is Plex. This little uh little uh vacation, this little retreat's called Plexcon. if you're not familiar with them. It I I guess it just kind of looks like Netflix. I don't I have no idea. Maybe Amazon Prime is supposed to be the thing here. I'm not really sure. But honestly, this this whole story, there's so many just you just wait. There's so many funny things. Okay, to start it off, my favorite part is that they themed this thing thematically the survivor like getaway. It's Plexon Survivor style. So Keith Valerie, the CEO, arrives a day early and he just goes into like an inner planning session. I'm going to become Jeff Prost. He is so excited. Guy has been watching hundred episodes of Survivor just really trying to learn the sass. We're voted out seconds into the game. You're now on a tribe of people who've played before. You've never played. Do you belong out here? You know, he was preparing that specific line for some employee. The bro was stoked. And what happens? I got E. coli, which is maybe the worst thing you could get possibly ever. Just as people were arriving on the buses, I was like, "Uhoh, I lost eight or 10 pounds." They had a doctor come to me, which apparently is pretty standard. They nailed an IV bag to the bed post. You just got to love it. Dude, the guy was training so hard. He was so stoked, spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on a retreat. So, if you actually go and watch the corporate video, you will see that yes, they actually did these survivor-l like challenges like serving a a spider or eating a scorpion. Look at this man. Look at him. He just eat a scorpion. The best part is Sean Eldridge, 55 at the time, Plex's head of business development and content, volunteered to eat the tarantula. He said, "I just grabbed it and did it. Pretty horrible. Not going to lie, those hairs. It's so ridiculous." is just like, "All right, hey, we're we're on we're on team vacation survivor style. I'm eating a tarantula." That just cannot that I don't know about that. I mean, I want to work with that guy, though. To be fair, being able to have a teammate that when something horrible happens, they're just like, "Yeah, I'll take care, dude. I'll take care of it. Business development a little BD, I'll go BD on this spider's ass." I love you, Sean. So, this next part's where things kind of get a bit more funny because if you jump onto the actual work video, what you're going to see is a bunch of people on the beach just kind of getting sandy, kind of getting yelled at. Now, you can tell this is where the CEO just was way, way too much into the survivor concept, okay? Because he decided that a bunch of people who work at a tech company, who probably work in aironditioned office for 40 plus hours a week, you know what they need to do? They need to go down to little Honduras and be able to go on a beach in 100 degree weather and have an actual Navy Seal kind of give them a bunch of drills. I love how the co-founder Olakowski kind of stated it. Olowsky acknowledged that this is not a super fit group in general. Damn. Damn. Getting just wrecked by the co-founder and the 100 degree heat and humidity quickly overwhelmed the ensemble. to tech workers. The ex-Navy Seal is like, "We could don it down, no problems. We get up there and it's hot and humid and people are passing out." I don't think he'd ever seen quite such an unfit group. Just imagine getting wrecked. Like, you have to go through this entire process and then after going through everything, you see the co-founder, the host, the the new Jeff props of the trip being like, "Yeah, yo, uh, Navy Seal, these are the most unfit people. I don't think they can do whatever this is. They're p they're literally passing out on a beach. But this, of course, is where it gets better. So they they leave the beach, right? They got to get off the beach. Okay. Hey, we're gonna go to somewhere nice. So they went to this nice little golf course where hey, the you know, the Navy Seal did what Navy Seals do best. All right, everybody drop and get me 40. Right. They everyone hits the ground. They got to go and do some sort of, you know, crawling on the ground or whatever they're doing. and a girl named Greta Schlendler, 41, hit the ground on command and landed directly on a hill of fire ants. I'm like, "Oh my god, what's happening?" Such a sweet What? Why am I on fire? She recalled. I was wearing shorts, okay? I jumped up and I had hives and bumps from bites and it was horrifying and it was so itchy and the medical area didn't have any regular antihistamines. They're like, "Oh, we can shoot some into your butt cheek." That was a first for me. I mean, honestly, what a trooper, Greta. Again, like I actually like as you read this story, you start to be like, you know who I really like? I actually kind of like the Plex employees. Like these Plex employees, like every single time someone, you know, this article is like a hit piece, like, oh yeah, man, this trip was absolutely hellish. And every time they write about one, it's just like, yeah, dude, I ate the tr I just did it. I just ate the tarantula. The next guy, oh yeah, I got bit by a bunch of fire ants. And they're like, "Hey, we got to put like a needle in your butt." And they're like, "Oh, okay. That sounds pretty good. First one for me." Like, "Who are these people? These people sound awesome. I want to work with these people." But the fire ant story actually gets better. The group's day trip to the nearby island provided little relief. Several staff members were left stranded there after planes failed to return. Meanwhile, Schlender's antihistamines had worn off. "They're looking for a doctor on the island to hook me up with another shot. I am writhing," she recalled. A woman in a hot pink shirt appeared. She put a line into a vein on the top of my hand so she could administer it. I'm like, I hope she's a doctor. What? What is happening? I just love the fact that like I recall it was a hot pink t-shirt and due to the fact that it was a hot pink t-shirt, I just did not believe in her being a medical doctor. So, you probably also caught the beginning about people being stranded on an island. Well, it turns out a lot of the people got on little airplanes to go visit a little island. And that little island, it turns out they ran out of time and a group of people just had to go and spend the night on the random island. Now, all of this that I'm telling you just sounds pretty bad, right? Like, it doesn't sound that good, but here's the funny part. If you go over to r/linus tech tips, you will see that Plex took its 120 employees to Honduras and it turned out into the Firefest 2.0. But the funny part is is that the actual employees apparently if Vansinator can be believed uh they're saying actually this was an awesome trip. So I was on this trip and worked at Plex for eight years. The negatives are massively overblown. Most of us had a blast and would go again in a heartbeat. See, the thing is is that Plex, all the employees, they're all remote. And so, every single year, they just get together for some wild time. And everything apparently is themed every single year around some sort of concept. And this was just the survivor theme style. And yeah, there's a couple oopsy daisies. Someone landed on a little fire antill, but it seems like everybody had a pretty good time. And you know the part where some employees got stuck on an island? Apparently, those who got stuck on Utilla, which is the name of the island, had the best stories the next day and were sharing photos on Slack the whole night they were there. Like, they were just having a blast. Apparently, they're taking one too many adult beverages and just enjoying their time. Anyh who, I just had to talk about this cuz I find it so funny. I love this idea that the CEO was just like, I am going to be Survivor. I am Survivor. and then just immediately gets demolished. I love the fact that just some random girl in a hot pink shirt just comes in and just starts putting needles in poor Shelender Greta. Poor Greta's the hand and apparently that just makes everything go away. And maybe the best part is that the the title the survivor style corporate retreat descends into hellish nightmare ends with Schlender despite the fire ants and mystery injection. the and the island ordeal calls it one of the most fun trips ever. The 2010s, those years, they just had such epic work trips. Oh my gosh. One of one of the times I went, I had to do a whole entire mountain biking thing. And here's the deal. You know, everyone thinks that they can like, oh, mountain biking, even if you go on some easy ones, it's not going to be all that bad. Now, me, I wasn't a biker. I wasn't much of a biker. And I discovered something that day. I could always turn to the left pretty easily. I couldn't turn right. I was not an ambi turner. I I didn't even know that was a thing. I didn't even know that was possible. And I'm over there taking these right-hand turns like, "Oh gosh, I'm going to fall off the bike." Left hand, I felt so good. It was such a disaster. I'm like, "Why am I mount? I'm not a bike. I don't like biking." Okay, my crotch hurts. My grundle's on fire and I'm out here in Arizona in like 110°ree biking. What the hell am I doing with my life? And honestly, one of the funnest times I've ever had. They just don't make work trips like they used to. I swear corporate culture, they're all they're way too afraid that somebody's going to get offended or something bad's going to happen or whatever is going to happen. So, they just don't plan them like they used to. This dude, this survivor style trip, I want to go on the hellish descent survivor style trip. That's what I want. That's what I want to be a part of. All right, that's it. I just wanted to yap about this for a little bit because this is honestly the funniest thing ever. Nobody ever shared this with me ever during my entire life. And now I'm just discovering this little gem. So I figured maybe you might not know about it either. And this little gem is pretty funny. I know this is a little bit outside of my normal work stuff. Even though you know tech these tech trips, I mean I did a couple of these so I felt like it was close enough. But hey, if you like this kind of content, let me know. Or if you hate it also, you can let me know. Hey, the name is the primogen.