Dear God, it's come to this, October 26, 2002
Reviewer: A reader from Raleigh, NC USA
Here's a few ideas for all we can have fun in the workplace: We cap CEO salaries so they're not making 400 times what the average worker is making. We get a decent national health care system so Americans have a choice besides enslaving themselves to corporations. We give all Americans a decent amount of vacation. We apply labor laws across the board, ending the 60 to 70 hour work week that so many of us now routinely endure. We stop shipping our skilled jobs overseas. That's how we can all have fun in the workplace.

See, here's the problem - if you're a manager who forced this nonsense on your employees you probably didn't bother to ask them if they wanted a toy fish. If they wanted a "sand box." It probably never even occured to you to step up to one of your employees and ask "how would you like to be humiliated and treated like a small child? How would you like to be forced to go home after 9 awful hours and bake cookies for everyone in the office to avoid being labeled 'not a team player'?" Because that's what "living the fish! philosophy" really means.

None of it even occurred to you, and that's the problem. From some particularly cruel act of fate you, who think that handing out children's toys to adults is treating them with respect, have somehow become a cog in the ever-turning wheels of power in this country. Somehow, people with the emotinal awareness of 2 year olds and the intellectual debth of sand crabs have taken control, and the rest of us are being forced to suffer for it.

Anything which can be written out on a 3x5 card is not a philosophy. Anything which involves handing out a stuffed fish is not respect.