Your Optional Fun Is an Unpaid Shift
The ping from the laptop is too cheerful. It’s a sound designed for good news, for a message from a friend, not for the digital manila envelope sliding under the door of your afternoon. The subject line flashes in bold: ‘Team Synergy Soiree: Axe-Throwing (Optional!)’. My shoulders tighten just reading the word ‘optional’, which in any corporate dictionary is defined as ‘a career-limiting move if declined’.
I can already feel the phantom weight of the axe-awkward, heavier than it looks, smelling of splintered pine and stale beer. I can picture the forced laughter, the performative high-fives. I can hear my manager, Brenda, saying, ‘Great to see you making the effort!’ The effort. The unspoken second job of demonstrating that you don’t just work here, you *belong* here. You are a *culture fit*. The unspoken expectation is that you will expend your personal, uncompensated time to prove it, one wobbly axe-throw at a time.
There’s a conversation I’ve rehearsed in my head at least 7 times for moments like this. It’s calm, it’s professional. It involves phrases like ‘prior personal commitment’ and ‘protecting my work-life balance to ensure peak productivity during business