Are You Fired-Up!

For about half my adult life I worked for a large company that got larger by the day. Twice each year, we had an all-inclusive company-wide meeting that lasted for about 2 weeks; 3 days at a time.  These meetings were usually held in a fairly centralized place like Kansas City or Dallas but occasionally were conducted in a more exotic location like Little Rock, Houston or Birmingham.

Present at these meetings were the individual managers from around the country along with numerous home office staff and company executives.  Attendance at one of these meetings averaged somewhere in the neighborhood of 6-8000 people. The majority of attendees had at least one thing in common aside from their mutual employer:  They would just as soon have been home drinking beer.

In my career I guess I attended 45 or 50 of these darn things.  In the meeting category that's a lot!

Over the years these twice annual meetings included early morning pep rallies, long days, short nights and endless company cliché's.  Throughout the day you'd hear, "So where are you now?", "How long have you been there?" and of course the ever popular, "How long have you been with the company now?".  The response to that last question would often times be, "Well, altogether....".

There were assorted reasons for the fairly common breaks in service, but the root cause often times was fraternization; not uncommon in the world of business and politics as well as in higher education, lower education and of course the restaurant industry, not to mention the furniture business and lets not even get started on the automotive industry.  Thus the "altogether" qualifier.

In fairness to the fraternization policy-breakers back in the old company days, if you were single it was difficult to avoid dating fellow employees since you spent the vast majority of your life at the company store trying to figure out how to sell more widgets.  And it was all about widget selling.

Where was I...oh yes...

At least a few times a day at these all-day/half-the-night meetings you'd hear some company executive, or future company executive, who couldn't think of anything else to say scream out, "Are you fired-up?". That's right; much like a football coach in the locker room just before a big game.  If the response indicated the group might not be as fired-up as that particular cheer-person thought we ought to be, he'd scream it out again, "I said are you fired-up!" until he, or the occasional she, was satisfied that you were at an appropriate level of professional arousal .

You'd first hear "Are you fired-up?" around 7 a.m. during the day's first general session. Having laid awake most of the previous night next to a roommate who snored like a beer-drinking bear, the last thing you were at 7 a.m. was fired-up. In the event you weren't fired-up or the more unlikely event you forgot where you worked, you'd hear one of the Onstage-Goomers yell out, "Let's do a Mega-Lo-Mart cheer--Gimme an M! Gimme an E! and so on.

I didn't have anything against the company cheer but to me once or twice a day seemed sufficient. At some point, however, one of our blue-clade lifers decided we needed to do a cheer at the beginning of every individual meeting.  So, we'd wind up doing the cheer about every 50 minutes during a 15 hour day.  Once I was so tired of doing the cheer I told a group of folks at a meeting that I was somewhat in charge of, "I'm about cheered out for the day so how about we don't do the cheer and just act like we did?"  I was nearly booed out of the room (these folks were fired up)!

As I recall, my first jubilation mistake occurred several years prior when I decided to lead a group of folks in a company cheer at the Mega-Low-Wholesale-Club home base, just outside the office of the head-guru, only to be told "don't do that again". He said the cheer was "inappropriate in the home office atmosphere".  I thought that was amazingly ironic😏

And of course it was a given that during the final meeting wrap-up, one of our fearless leaders was going to proclaim, "I think this has been the best meeting we've ever had!".  Predictably, the massive crowd would respond with rousing applause augmented by cat-calls, train whistles and assorted noise makers made in China.  Folks were finally super fired-up because we could now head back home and get back to drinking beer:)

It was an extraordinary time period inside a great company full of a lot of super fine folks.  I'm glad I was there for part of it and glad it's over.

Thanks for your service and until we meet again, I'll try to keep you posted...Gimme a "P"!