Reply All - #29 The Takeover

Episode Date: June 23, 2015

Thomas Oscar is an Australian teenager who tried to make the most boring Facebook group possible - a group where members pretend to be corporate drones in a non-existent office. This week's episode was reported by Karen Duffin (www.karenbduffin.com).  Sponsors: Xero (www.xero.com/podcasts) Stamps.com (www.stamps.com, offer code 'reply') Squarespace (www.squarespace.com, offer code 'reply') Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

From Gimlet, this is Reply All, a show about the internet. I'm Alex Goldman. This week's episode is basically wall-to-wall swear words, with the occasional word appropriate for your children. So, listener, you've been advised. So this is a story about the struggle for control of a multinational company with thousands of employees. The only thing is that this company,

it started and it mostly existed in the mind of a teenage boy. Reporter Karen Duffin has the story. The boy is Thomas Oscar. He's 17. Hey, hello, Karen. Hey, Thomas, how you doing? He lives in this sleepy beach town in Australia, mostly just hangs out with his friends, plays with his dog Shisha.

He volunteers at a thrift shop. I just kind of stand around and look busy. That's cool. Why do you do it? I don't know. I don't really have much else to do on Saturday mornings. So the story starts last summer. It was a rainy Tuesday night, like a few days after I turned 16. and I was sitting in my room, very bored, and I was like, what can I do tonight?

So I was like, I'll just make a Facebook group, like, for slight lulls. Slight lulls. Thomas likes to make Facebook groups when he's bored, like deliberately lame Facebook groups, like Facebook groups for mushroom foraging diehards. So this time around, he thinks, how about office life? I mean, his mom has an office job, and she likes the work, but he just can't really believe how stupid the actual office class. culture is. It's just like playground shit. Like it's stuff that like just really immature, like,

or like leaving like passive aggressive notes on the fridge, kind of like, we like didn't wash this spoon after they stood their coffee, like, ro-a-b-rah, if we catch you doing it again, there'll be a formal complaint and make stuff like that. Just like really like petty shit. You're like, who cares? And so he makes his newest, lamest Facebook group. It's a group for people who want to gather online and imagine they all work in this office together. Online role-playing, but for an office job. And that was the birth of Staxwell & Co. Stackswell & Co?

Stackswell & Co. What do they sell? They shift units. Oh, it's like a spacely sprockets on the Jetsons. They just shift. They just shift units. Yeah. Thomas made himself the CEO, invited his friends, and started taking applications.

I just wrote up this, like, just a post being like, you have to submit a resume, like, telling what you're doing. job you want, and I signed everyone job titles and jobs. And, like, I had, like, for age department, I had a head of department. It was, like, a head of IT info sales. There was a head of sales. And then underneath them was all the, like, sales representatives, like, senior sales executives. Like, and they all had to report to the head of their department who reported to me.

Within days, they had everything from an office dress code to HR regulations, environmental policies and inventory spreadsheet, even in office intranet. What does this look like? Can you show it to us? Yeah, yeah. So at the very beginning, so you can kind of see down here. We're looking at a typical Facebook group. The banner image is a bunch of computers in a cubicle. And then there's a bunch of like associated tags. And the tags are synergy, office, and hard work. And the very first post is about like a training for the new toilet system. Or there's this other post from this guy named Bradley that says, team, I think will be potentially,

actioning our key accounts to reflect on our core values moving forward. They know all the fake words. It's also so vexing that teenagers know adult slang and adults are misified by teenage slang. Like, if we don't know FLEC, they shouldn't know core values. No, they shouldn't. They know KPI's. I don't know what a KPI is. A key performance indicator.

I worked in corporate America for 10 years. Yeah, exactly. I mean, the posts look like emails. They have subject lines, twos and froms. And the emails look like what you might actually. actually get in an office. And there'd be like a post that's like, it gets halfway through and then it cuts off in the middle. And then in the comments, they'd be like, oops, hit send too fast. Tim did that last week. It happens.

Still haven't heard back. Like, it was funny in like a kind of bit of a meta way, I guess. It was funny because everyone's taking it so seriously. And then there's like a lot about like fake fun because that's the thing in offices. So Zach Donald comes on and says, for anyone who's interested, for anyone who's interested, I'm interested, I'll be hosting a get-together at my mother's house for soft drink and light beers. We've earned it. Sorry, I just want to bring up from this morning. Oh, we're going to get a real email.

To Gimlet Media staff. Hold for Gimlet Grills off-site. That's our off-site fun grilling thing that we're doing, which I'm genuinely excited about because I'm boring and old. We sent around an inner office poll to see when people could schedule time for fun. It was like a spreadsheet poll. It was like, please tick. off your availability over the next four weeks. Which, let me just say, like, there's not an alternative.

Like, you can't pull out a super soaker from your desk and be like, we're partying, like, in actual adult life. Like, you need spreadsheets to have your fun. But should you just give up fun? It does make your fun feel, it does make your fun feel a little gray. Really? Yeah, it does. It's like, we've slotted our fun into this hermetically sealed box that will occur two weeks

from now. It does feel like a little... The thing you're describing is called a calendar, and it's like how people live their lives. So, anyway, Thomas told me that when he was taking applications, one big problem that he had was that too many of his friends just wanted to be janitors. Like, yeah, I want to be a janitor.

I was like, fuck off. You're like the 30th person to say that, like, you're not funny. There's not like, you're never going to have a company. Like, if you only have five sale reps in your company, which, like, when it was small, you're not going to have 20 janitors, which is what everyone, like, thought it would be funny to be. or people who were like, yeah, I want to be a toilet technician,

or I want to be the sole cleaner of the microwave in the, like, the break room. I'm like, no one does it in an office. Like, that's not a thing. Wow, you were super serious about this. Yeah, like, we were trying to be so serious about it. We were just trying to be, like, I remember at the start. I was literally spending like three or four hours a night on upkeep of the company. But within a few weeks, Thomas's joke about boring, meaningless office work

was starting to resemble boring, meaningless office work. fake resumes are piling up, they need to be bedded. So Thomas is like, screw this, finds a friend and asks him to help him manage it. Wait, that means he accidentally hired a middle manager. Oh, yeah. He thought he was a teenager shirking, but he's like, I don't want to do this. He gave the job to somebody else and checked out. Like, he just became a vacant CEO.

Oh, absolutely. He has a secretary within like two days who's like, please send all messages to me instead of directly to Thomas. Yeah, it was good. It was kind of the golden age of Staxwell and Co. Thomas had created an entire world run completely by teenagers, totally uncontaminated by adults. After the break, the grown-ups show up and do what grownups always do. They ruin everything.

Welcome back to the show. Before the break, 17-year-old Thomas and his teenage friends were surprisingly invested in role-playing that they worked at a fake company called Staxwell & Co. Karen Duffin picks the story up here. So a few weeks into his job running this fake company, Thomas does what. CEOs do. I went to Vietnam for like a couple weeks. He takes his vacation and checks out of Staxwell entirely. I hadn't been home for two weeks.

I get home instead of my computer, turn it on, open Facebook, look at my 100,000 notifications or whatever. And he sees that Staxwell, his fake office run by teenagers, has exploded. Tons of new users. There was like a thousand or something. It had just shot up so quick and I was like, what? I just had no concept of why that had happened. There are people from the United Arab Emirates, France, Canada, the United States, actual office workers.

My name is David Jones, DAV-I-D, Common Spelling Jones, J-O-N-E-S. David works at a cable news company. My name is Victoria. I live in Toronto, Ontario. My day job is I'm a project manager in renewable energy. They love Staxwell. It's cute, you know. It's non-offensive.

It's, you go there, you get a little chuck. You know, if you see something like ridiculous at work and then you see something even more ridiculous there, you just kind of smile and it makes life hilarious. And with new employees came new jokes, but these were jokes that broke Thomas's rules. They didn't sound like normal, boring office emails. These ones were hammy, like over the top. And the one that really got to Thomas was this joke about iguanas. It went something like this. A bunch of iguanas gets shipped to the mailroom and nobody picks them up, so they escape and,

And they start running wild in the office. I want to punch myself in the head, like, out of anger. Like, ugh! And then people start making variations on the iguana joke, like sexual harassment policies for iguanas or iguanas are stealing my cigarettes. This specific one dude, like, and he did it in the whole email format, it was like, oh, our reptilian overlords, I've requested your meeting on next Sunday morning at, like, 3 a.m., ha, ha, ha, ha. Like, what the fuck?

Like, that's not funny. Like, where's the humor? in that, like, your boss is a lizard? Like, is that what's funny? Is it the fact that he called you in for a meeting at a dumb hour? Is it the fact that lizards can't use the phone? Like, what's funny about that? It's like someone decided to make fun of an office

and, like, office humor took over this joke about the office. Yeah, there's a lot of dad humor. But not everyone hated the dad humor. I don't mind that humor. Dad jokes can be hilarious if they're done right. That's David Fruh,

Thomas' nemesis. In real life, he's an insurance lawyer in Sydney, and he loves his job. I love my office, actually. Oh, what? Mine's probably the most personalized office on my floor. When David says he loves his office, he doesn't mean just his job or the people. I mean, he loves his office, the way a sailor loves the sea. There's obviously glass doors and glass windows because everything is transparent, et cetera.

And on the glass front of my office is a number of pictures from my travels around Europe and Japan. I haven't put up Indonesia or China. I'm not there yet. And then once you go inside, it's a little bit messy, although I'm sure my personal assistant's cleaned it since I left. I've got two screens on my desk, which just makes life easier. And I've got a statue of Lady Justice, which I bought for myself in Louve in 2013. I've got a plaque.

My friend got me for my 21st birthday, which is a quote from Frank Herbert, which says, law is the ultimate science. I've got a collection of chocolate. David is proudly unabashedly, a total grown-up. And he says that even back when he was Tompillar, He dreamed of the day he would work in an office. I always wanted to be a grown-up. I never really enjoyed the idea of being in school.

I mean, you know, there was a lot of free time, but it didn't feel like you're actually accomplishing anything. But what did you do for fun when you were 17? Oh, actually, that's probably a story I can tell you. All right, go. So, year 11, formal, I didn't have a girlfriend at that point in time, so I was just like, well, I'm going to must have fun. And so to the formal.

I wore 18th century formal gear being a full dinner suit plus cape, top hat, cane, cravat, the whole works. And, you know, obviously it was a bit of a hit with the ladies. Lots of photos from that night. And of course, next year everyone copied me. So, you know...

And David was thrilled when his buddy told him about this group where you could role play office life. He thought it would appeal to my sense of humor and was correct in that assumption. But David's kind of humor of course, did not appeal to Thomas. I was genuinely angry. Like, I had,

it just, like, made me furious that these people had, like, taken what was, like, originally, like, a meta-humor kind of thing, and just turned it into, like, casual, idiotic jokes. He made, like, a punk rock album, and they're using it to sell candy bars. Like, I totally understand why he's pissed off.

Like, it's, like, the point of his joke was, your life sucks, and it's fake, and they quietly co-opted it to me. make the point of his joke like, what if iguanas worked at your office? Which is a different joke. Yeah. They made elevator music out of his punk rock. That's exactly it.

Yeah. And Thomas was so mad. Actually, let me pull up what he says. Anyone who posts about iguanas is banned. You know, you can kind of like hear people looking around and being like, is he serious? And someone replies, well, I welcome them. And Thomas replies, well, that's nice seeing that you're fired. And he bans him.

So this is the first fire. And then someone replies, you're a dick, and he fires him. Like, yo ban, yo ban, you're being the band, hammer. And then someone else says, iguan is forever, and he gets fired. And then someone comes on and totally defends him. He's like, I welcome this decision in new management direction. Having never worked in an office environment before, I joined this group with the expectation of genuine generic office roleplay,

but I've been severely underwhelmed with my experience. How did Thomas respond to that guy? Oh, someone says, you want to know what's going on here? That dude gets fired. That guy should be fired. Yeah, and Thomas basically decides that they all should be fired. I, like, flipped out and wrote this big thing being, like, you guys are the worst. Like, none of you were funny at all.

Like, you've destroyed the integrity of Staxwell and Co. I'm deleting this group if no one gives me a fucking reason to keep it. So the day Thomas threatens to shut down Staxwell & Co. David Frew. I'm on the way back from the beach reading my phone. and I see a litany opposed by Oscar. That's Thomas's last name, Thomas Oscar. And so I sort of looked at it and I'm like, okay,

I'm sure that this group, it doesn't deserve to be shut down because someone has an issue with iguanas. So he proposed a buyout. He messaged Thomas. I was like, all right, how much? And it was like $20. And I was like, I talked to him, I was like not $25. And I said to him, well, look, I'll pay $25 and draw up the contract.

But I was convinced my position. was secure enough without having to do so. When he was like, I'll draw a contract up, I was like, what? Like, don't do that. Like, just be chill, man. Just be chill. David PayPaled Thomas the money, and Thomas handed him the admin rights. And then David ushered in this new era of Staxwell & Co.

With a post that embraced Dad Humor. It was basically like, I'm creating a steering committee to launch this new company. And for now, we have boat steering wheels and we have rudders. This post would have made Thomas and his friends so mad, but they never heard it, because David's second act as CEO was The Purge. He blocked me. He blocked me from it, and I was very cut about it.

I was like, why? David fired the teenagers. If you're listening, David, for you, you're a dickhead. Like, I hate you. Like, it's just, ugh. And it's just so wrong. Like, you're so wrong. Did he say why he did it to you?

Did he tell you? Yeah. Here's why. He said that you started a rival group and that you were trying to recruit people to it. Oh, yeah, I did actually. I forgot about that. It got like 10 members, though. I don't think it'd actually get cut. Thomas's rival group didn't catch on. But David was nice about it. He still lists Thomas on the Staxwell page as its visionary founder. In real life, there are places where kids are allowed to be kids and grownups pretty much leave them alone. I mean, grownups don't show up at actual high school dances and start grinding with everybody. And Thomas wishes that the internet were more like that.

He doesn't like it when grown-ups try to act like kids. I think old people should be allowed on the internet for looking at, you know, like business and stuff or for sending actual emails to their real bosses or to find recipes. By old people, Thomas means anyone over 25. So by his definition, I'm an old person, the grim specter of what's to come.

Yeah. How old did you say? You were like in your 30s? Yeah, yeah, I am. So do you have, sorry, do you have like a living, do you have a living boyfriend? No. All right, when you go, just quickly, when you go out to like a Thai restaurant, what dish do you order and how spicy do you get it? I'm going to guess you order the mild pad tie and, you know, a glass of house wine.

Wow. I mean, I'll let me guess, like, you'd listen to you. I'm going to say definitely Mumford and Sons. He's right. I've seen them in concert. twice. But Thomas says that's okay. It's inevitable. Lamedness comes for all of us. Yeah. I mean, I've kind of like resigned myself to it, I think. Really? I just can't see, I cannot picture myself at 32 enjoying my life. Like I can't,

like, I think that's like that's it. That's the end. Like, game over. Thomas graduates from high school this December and becomes an official adult. He hopes to go to the University of Newcastle. But for now, he's just enjoying his last few months. months of being a kid, hanging out at the thrift store, making Facebook groups, playing with his band, the neglections. Oh my God. I had a band that sounded exactly like this when I was in high school. We were called Blue Onion, and this song is called Lame Parties.

I thought I was like a real punk rock kid. Fuck you. I seriously like, I was like, I was like so disdainful of my parents, and I thought I would grow up and like I would thought I would reject almost all of society and I thought that like when the revolution came I wouldn't be one of the stodgy stodgy stuff shirts against up against the wall but I know that I will be why did you change why didn't you stick to your punk rock questionably punk rock I got less selfish I think oh you're very like there's something very selfish about that that mentality you know what I mean it's like all you think about is like I'm

like your own authenticity and like how cool you are and how you're perceived by people. Do you guys feel weird about the fact that he's a teenager who's saying adult life is very terrible and his view of adult life is pretty accurate? Like is that depressing? Yeah, I mean, sort of. You know, except for society to work, a lot of people have to have jobs that they don't like, they don't hate, they just go to. And like, Thomas is at an age where it makes sense from to rage against him. that and to be like, no, not me, and it shouldn't be anybody, and it sucks. But for the rest of us,

like, you have to make peace with it. And, like, I think that their point to him is sort of like, it's not as bad as you think it is. It's kind of funny, actually. And his point to them is like, no, it's terrible. And you guys are so brainwashed by this that you can't even admit that it's terrible anymore. Thomas promised me that he'll let me know in a few years if he's been brainwashed, like the rest of us grownups. So will you call me when you turn 28? and tell me if you made it out. I sure will. On my 28th birthday, I will wake up next to my living girlfriend,

like congealed pad tie on my bloody dresser, and I'll think of you, and I'll say, this is where my life is. All right. Well, let's circle back. Yeah, circle back to me. Yeah, I feel like this conversation, we really, like, we really synergized well.

I really feel, I feel like that we're going to be able to optimize because of the great work that we have been able to collaborate, on together. All right. Yes, I'll definitely agree with that. Okay, go team. I'll shoot you an email with a dates later. Okay, please do.

All right. Thanks, Thomas. Have a good one. Bye. All right. Thank you, Karen. Bye. That was reporter Karen Duffin.

Reply is hosted by PJ Vote and me, Alex Goldman. We were produced this week by Tim Howard, Truthy Penamennini, and Fia Benin. Production assistance from Sylvie Douglas. Special thanks to Emma Jacob and Emily Kennedy. Matt Lieber is that rock quarry you've been swimming at for years. and still, no one else seems to know about it. Our theme music is by the mysterious breakmaster cylinder,

and our ad music is by build buildings. You can find more episodes at iTunes.com slash reply all. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you next week.