🫠 We may have miscalculated. Slightly.
Before we get into it, I want to make one thing clear: the reason why Marketing organized a company-wide bake-off was to encourage friendly competition and give all of us a chance to let loose, relax and have some no-strings-attached fun at a low-stakes event.
It was also an opportunity for everyone to bring their favorite snack to work and show off their hidden cooking or baking skills.
So yes.
The road may have led us straight to hell but our intentions were good.
Did we anticipate certain competitive people going all in? Of course. We have met most of you before.
Did we encourage some well-meant ribbing and teasing with our self-developed rating system, the emoji buttons and the fifteen new trophies we invented that include titles like the 'most steal-worthy one' or the 'would sell out all my co-workers and swear undying loyalty to a supervillain for this' title? Naturally.
Were we expecting Finances to unofficially take several illegal bets on who wins, who loses and which department has the highest percentage of each? Obviously.
It was XERXES' first bake-off. It was meant to be fun.
But.
That was all there was to it.
Maybe certain people got a little carried away. Okay. I can accept that. And yes, perhaps some of the jokes were in poor taste.
However.
We specified in the rules that influencing the outcome of this competition would lead to immediate disqualification for a reason. Perhaps more importantly: the awards we planned to hand out were not meant to be taken as challenges.
We also did not rig the competition against any teams, no matter what PR claims.
(Hey, just because there are some departments where only a single person got nominated for any of the awards and did not win it doesn't mean that the game was fixed. Maybe you just suck. Collectively and with all due respect.)
Trust me. I would know.
Because for some unknown reason I was part of every single mail chain that went into organizing the finer details of the bake-off, even though I was really only responsible for the internal communication part thanks to this newsletter. So if there was a secret conspiracy pulling strings behind the scenes, believe me, I would know about it.
Everything that happened may have happened for a reason but that reason was not our secret doomsday plan. There is no secret doomsday plan.
Got it?
Good.
Now, just in case you have somehow missed the...unexpected turn our bake-off took and don't understand why most of your colleagues turn green at the mention of the word 'scone', let me catch you up.
(Though I struggle to imagine how anyone could have missed the screams. Our friendly neighborhood supervillains issued a noise complaint, and they are usually pretty tolerant.
But I digress.)
This is what happened:
On Thursday, we started setting up on the 7th floor at 12:00 as planned. We did book the entire floor advance—between Building Security and Top Management that turned out to be a logistical nightmare I am very thankful I was only tangentially involved in—so that part went off without a hitch.
Participants started arriving around 12:35-12:55 with their dishes.
There were a couple of small-scale incidents (shout-out to the people who did not sign up for the competition in spite of the three separate reminders I sent you all, the people who had strong Opinions™ on how their baked goods should be presented and who were not impressed by our limited decorative options and the people who wanted to start snacking before the organizers had finished registering all the dishes even though they were reprimanded every time they tried) but nothing we weren't prepared to handle.
We encountered the first real hiccup once the official tasting started.
In retrospect we should have kept a closer eye on all contributions from R&D. Particularly since one brave participant named their snack 'Quantum scones'.
He assured several skeptical organizers that the scones were "well within the rules" and I suppose he wasn't wrong. They didn't explode, hurt or kill anyone.
They did, however, screw with the test buds of anyone who tried them.
Not in the same way either or we might have caught on sooner. Several test eaters reported tasting "all possible flavors at once" and then promptly got sick due to sensory overload. What we assume to be around twenty percent temporarily existed in multiple timelines at once, which made for a very confusing, not to mention confidential incident report. Around half of the scones have also caused what R&D calls 'temporal flavor echoes'—meaning that the people who ate them now experience the taste of food they haven't eaten yet.
While none of these effects were desirable, the latter made it impossible for people to continue judging the various foods on display as they could not with any confidence say whether the food they tasted was the one they were eating or some dish from the distant future.
By the time Yenna realized this, several fights had already broken out over "unjustified criticism".
Since the scones were popular, more than half the votes had to be disqualified. This, in turn, infuriated the ones leading the race, as they suddenly found themselves back on places 27, 29 and 36 for the 'best dish overall' respectively.
Number 29, a decent lemon tart with a little too much meringue for my personal taste, did not take the demotion well. They also, on a related note, have a gift for liquefying solids and decided to make that everyone else's problem.
To their credit: they did not mess with the other baked goods. Directly, at least.
Unfortunately several members from Facility Management, who were already incensed by the clear manipulation attempt from R&D, took the puddles that used to be chairs for the less energetic participants as a personal insult. The heated discussion that followed led to two overturned tables and five ruined dishes.
After that it was all-out war.
At some point during the escalating food fight—I'm still a little unclear on who threw the first plate but by the Cursed did everyone seem happy to join in—I got hit in the back of the head with a brownie that could have passed for a rock and lost track of what was happening.
Thankfully Yenna had my back. And carried me to Medical.
I was not the only one who ended up there.
At some point after that, Building Security declared that the bake-off was over.
It took them another hour and a half to break through the last barricade and shut the fighting down for good. They also tried to arrest everyone who participated in the illegal betting pool Finances definitely hasn't been running behind our back. However, given the number of people involved they settled for a black mark in everyone's file instead.
And now, for some reason, everyone blames Marketing for the mess. Especially Facility Management.
Which isn't fair.
I am not trying to throw stones here but I think we can all agree that R&D's ridiculously distorted understanding of the words 'safe to consume' and the person who ranked on the 29th place (not naming names but I have absolutely seen them at the help desk) have definitely contributed to the rather abrupt end.
But sure, blame the people who put two weeks worth of arguing with Finances over the budget, too many hours of overtime into picking the right awards and way too many meetings designing an interesting evaluation matrix for the participants into this event.
It's not our fault if you were dumb enough to place a bad illegal bet and get caught doing so.
Also no one forced you to join the fight. I'm looking at you, Shane.
(And everyone else too. You know who you are.)
On the bright side, despite the tempting target it presented, our bake-off did not get infiltrated or interrupted by a supervillain.
I am a little sad that we did not get to test Plan Cake The Villain but I suppose that is the price we have to pay for a lack of near-death experiences and disproportionate property damage.
I'll take it.
In other news, my team went over the votes again this morning, after Building Security finally let us get all our stuff back from the 7th floor.
I am happy to announce that the overall winner of our first ever company bake-off is:
🥇 Viktor from Data Analytics🥇
Congratulations! His passion fruit cheesecake was undoubtedly one of the best cakes many of us have ever tasted.*
(That's right, fellow world savers. If you thought a little food-throwing temper tantrum would keep us from publishing the true and honest ranking, as voted by a little over a third of all participants, I have bad news for you.
The complete list, including the winners of the fifteen secondary awards, can be found on the intranet.
Spoiler: PR didn't win a single one of them. A true shame that.)
All in all—and considering the colorful history of XERXES' past company-wide activities—I do consider the event a solid partial success. Which is a good thing, since it will probably remain our last bake-off for the foreseeable future.
Or ever.
Oh well. I guess that's what makes it special.
*Unless you tried one of the quantum scones. In that case, R&D assures me that the effects are supposed to last for no more than 213 hours at most.
Pinky promise.
