Team-building. The worst. It’s only reason, the company’s profits are too high and someone complained to Human Resources that they haven’t been being treated right. The only reason to take us from our desks. Laser tag, paintball, bowling, picnic in the park with warm beer and cheap sandwiches. I had lived through it all and if I’d known another event had been planned, I would have called in sick. But there was no warning, at ten o’clock when most take their first coffee break and I like to concentrate in the quiet lull, the email popped up on my screen: IMPORTANT!

I clicked and read:

To support the continued valued and esteemed cooperation of our staff, you are invited (mandatory) to a game of hide-and-seek punctually at 10:15 a.m..

That’s all it said, I looked at my computer screen—-10:14. Before anyone had come back from their breaks—-so I couldn’t ask if they knew where we were to meet—-a short burst of air tickled my neck. Then black. A bag was pulled down over my head. A slippery slickness inside that bag, first I felt a flash of giddiness, then a wave of exhaustion, then nothing.

The sense of timelessness came to an end. My tongue pulled to release itself from the roof of my mouth, the muscles of my face strained to open my eyelids. A blur. Some forms. Then I saw the shapes of other colleagues loosening their tongues and eyes. I recognized them, not one from my immediate team, all the loners who tried to stay on their own islands. We tried to trade polite smiles. A metallic echo ending in a high pitch pressed itself from the unseen speakers. Then a voice: Welcome to the first team-building hide-and-seek. The words bounced five times off those gray, barren walls.

A silence brought our hearts too unusual beats. Again a metal squeak: A colleague from each one of your teams has been hidden. Your job is to find them. Everyone has to work together. If you’re all successful, you’ll get a raise and bonus for the year.

Silence.

Metal screech: And if you’re successful, you and your colleagues will escape this time with your lives. Quite an incentive, we the management thought.

Silence. Metal mumble. Almost mute giggles.

Our eyes desperate looked for solace in the others’. Nothing was there.

Metal screech: Ten, nine, eight…

The count set us scrambling. Oh how I wished I was in a laser tag suit, splattered with paint, lobbing a ball, even drinking a warm beer and fumbling a stale sandwich. That day they made us into a team, at least those who survived.