I got the following email earlier this week…

Attached please find the flyer invitation for distribution to your staff and their direct reports to attend this year’s Company Picnic which will be held at Liberty Park on August 25, 2010. Our invitation is for our employees and their immediate family. Employees must RSVP no later than 8/16 as to whether or not they will be attending and a count of their family members to ensure we have enough food for all attending. All Board Members have been invited as well as the team at Western Region…they were Bcc’d…

John

The company picnic: that venerable institution which brings employer and employees together in a semi-social encounter, usually at the end of the Summer and may or may not be fun. The email set in motion a host of thought s of company picnics our family attended as I was growing up. I am sure I have mentioned at one place or another in this blog that my dad was a sheet metal worker and a union man. He worked for a shop which installed and repaired furnace and air conditioners. The shop had about forty employees and every summer they had a company picnic. The picnic was held in Julie Davis Park in the heart of Boise. Some years it was burgers and hot dogs—in the good years they served fried chicken from the Plantation Golf course—Bob Taylor, the boss, I am sure was a major golfer and a member of the Plantation. Regardless of burgers or chicken there was always watermelon tons of watermelon. Beer too but some how that seemed so alien we tended to block(psychologically) the tubs of iced beer which I am sure were somewhere in the vicinity..

I hardly ever saw my dad in casual clothes usually overalls or his church clothes. And he would go to these event casual, even stranger was seeing my dad interact with his peers but I did at the company picnic. We ate chicken—had Clover Clubs potato chips from ‘industrial sized’white bags number 3 red dyed punch and watermelon and a chance to see the other folks in my dads life and their weird families( which I am sure we looked just as weird to them). The picnic was one of the biggest events of our summer.

I work in a State office of five or six people—everyone likes each other but not enough to meet them omn their own time outside of work to eat KFC , bottled water and maybe melon from Cosco chunked and that you eat with tooth picks. Somehow it is just not the same…