Tried to find the most
boring answers.

Your favorite movie? The Tree of Life

Your favorite book? Gravity’s Rainbow

Favorite Band/Song: The Carpenters

Favorite hobby: Knitting

Your last best vacation?: Staying home during the Covid pandemic

You are best when...? Listening to politicians

You dislike when...? Listening to TV adverts

Go with the Paris catacomb pic. They should really appreciate that, and you still get to give them a subtle dig.

But play the game, and play it with good humor and style.

quote:

Originally posted by PHPaul:
Where's the option of just ignoring the whole thing?

Haha...you so much me remind me of my first Senior Chief almost 30 years ago...”No Ensign, I didn’t ask you to tell me how do you THINK the HPAC works, instead tell me how DOES the HPAC work!” Sadly, MMCS (SW) Jerry Hudson left us and our navy too soon...

quote:

Originally posted by cne32507:
You guys are so dull! Frayed was just trying to have some fun: He didn't want our advice!! Your replies show that you are all pussywhipped. Lighten up, people! (geez)

K.

Lol I don’t mind the advice. Although the humorous replies are much more fun. I was hoping there was a politically correct way to tell them to fuck off. Of course I know there isn’t. I will come up with bland answers. But I welcome colorful answers from you guys.

Oh I’m sorry, I must not have gotten or seen that email works for me. After about the third time they quit sending them and leave me alone

Your favorite movie? The Flintstones

Your favorite book? Mein Kampf

Favorite Band/Song: Chuck Berry/My Dingaling

Favorite hobby: Solving my Rubik’s Cube with my feet (yes, it’s a thing).

Your last best vacation?: This past summer I visited the largest landfills in the contiguous U.S.

You are best when...? I’m asleep.

You dislike when...? Mom toasts my bread too much.

How about this one for a family photo?

I hated that shit as well, but I don't see these questions as getting into personal info. Just provide defensible answers for when they go around the room and ask you to discuss.

No questions about your family, do you drink or take drugs, have you ever been fired, have you ever been arrested, and so on.

I don't have a favorite anything, except a certain food.

Play along...
Use very vague answers...
Use this pic

Okay, Slayer. Seasons in the Abyss was the best album. You cannot deny that Jim.

fwiw, The film Severance is a cheeky European horror movie about a Team Building Exercise gone wrong.

Worth a watch, at least.

Pretend to be the main character in Office Space, see if they get the joke:

Your favorite movie? Office Space
Your favorite book? Vibe
Favorite Band/Song: It's Good to be a Gangsta
Favorite hobby: Doing nothing
Your last best vacation?: Missing work, but not really missing it.
You are best when...? I am not writing TPS reports
You dislike when...? I have six bosses asking about the TPS reports

Let me offer a bit of perspective from the other side of the equation. I'm a Senior Project Manager by trade. I've dealt with hundreds of project teams over the years. When I worked for a then Fortune 100 Tech firm, my boss continually got inundated with requests from HR to have his staff perform these retarded 'team building' exercises. I hated them every bit as much as everyone else did, and pushed back wherever I thought I could. However, HR has to find some reason to exist, and the rest of us get to suffer for their existence. If your PM is anything like me, he'll have as little interest in this nonsense as you do, so as others have noted, respond, keep everything general, and play along as best you can so that everyone can get back to doing what they're actually paid to do.

quote:

Favorite Band/Song: Chuck Berry/My Dingaling

Ok, I lost it.

Reading this stupidity all I can think is "God, I'm glad I don't have to deal with it anymore."

^^^^ The thing that gets me is in a company filled with engineers, that professes to make decisions using data, and that uses 6 sigma as the common system for improvement, the HR people are enamored of scientifically unproven and invalid crap like Meyers Briggs and TKI. And there's alway an engineering executive that drank the kool aid and thinks this stuff is real.

I had no idea these things were not given any credence by actual psychiatric and psychological researchers and practitioners, until I looked it up. And if you bring up the fact to HR and ask them why in a company that lives and dies by our design and manufacturing engineering skills we would use unscientific parlour games, and they just say this is what we use and act like you're the problem.

quote:

Originally posted by Beancooker:
Okay, Slayer. Seasons in the Abyss was the best album. You cannot deny that Jim.

Well I’m a child of the 80s. I mean seasons came out in 90 so not too late. But it’s Reign in Blood and South of Heaven for me. Maybe Hell Awaits if it was mixed a little better. I did sing seasons in the abyss at karaoke once. They thought the intro would never end.

quote:

I had no idea these things were not given any credence by actual psychiatric and psychological researchers and practitioners, until I looked it up. And if you bring up the fact to HR and ask them why in a company that lives and dies by our design and manufacturing engineering skills we would use unscientific parlour games, and they just say this is what we use and act like you're the problem.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
This stuff is basically 1970s Pop Psychology. Hope you have Encounter groups sometime.

One of the many reasons I started my own company, to get away from the madness.

I did get a little bit of it around 5 or 6 years ago when a minority female employee complained that my company name was racist (she didn't know the difference between race and ethnicity). I got asked where it came from, I told them, and that was the end of it.