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 |    Not for the faint of art. |
#oralsurgeryteam Whenever I hear or see the word "team," these days, I cringe. Partly, this is because of its association with sports, which I think need to be toned down some; there are other ways to practice competition and cooperation than ball-chasing. But mostly, it's because of the insistence that everyone be a "team player." There is, of course, nothing wrong with being a team player. But too often, that's code for "give it everything you got so I can take credit and you get to keep your job." It could be worse, of course; your boss could keep insisting that the workplace is a "family." That's even worse than a team, because at least with a team, you get to decide to go play for someone else or just walk away; options are far more restricted with family. And families can get pretty dysfunctional. Not mine, really, but in general. I always wanted a mug or something with "I put the 'me' in 'team'" on it, but I never got one; I don't drink coffee anyway, and I eventually opted to just walk away. But if you're going to insist on calling your workers a team, why not go all the way? Organize a football league. By football, I mean soccer; I'm afraid I'm being thoroughly internationalized. You can have the Oral Surgery Team facing off against the Grocery Workers Team, or the Emergency Room Team facing off against the Hardware Store Team. I don't mean just sponsorships, either. When I tried playing baseball as a kid, I got assigned to the Hardware Store Team. We wore shirts with the giant logo of the local hardware store on the back. Which, as an aside, leads me to the other problem I have with sports, which is that they're often basically ads. Sometimes they're ads for a college or a city, but they're also ads for products. This is most obvious with car racing, which may not actually count as a sport because there's no ball involved, but does involve teams. Anyway, yes, the players would be amateurs. That's the point. It's never enough to just have fun with your chosen hobby; you have to compete to see who's best, and the less-best get left in the dust. This was bad enough when competitions were local or regional, but now, with the internet, they're worldwide, and you're competing against 8 billion other people. That makes it hard to really stand out, on a par with winning a lottery. But hey, sometimes you gotta take one for the team. |
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