Any-o-gram

Perhaps you have heard of this thing called the Enneagram. It's based on 9 personality types, all drawn very sharply (because apparently God got bored after the ninth kind of person he made and just stopped), allowing for some variation within each "type". There's "the nurturer" (perhaps I should be capitalizing), "The Artist", "The Perfectionist", and of course, "The Leader". There are five other types, which all, for some reason, escape my memory, probably because they were all presented to me and my coworkers as protoplasmic filler, the unnoticeable bassline of humanity, you might say. Yes, my coworkers and I were treated to a special glimpse through this window into our office's collective soul in an all-day "teambuilding" session. My boss thought that it would be a good idea to have one of her friends come in and tell us about our place on the wonderwheel of emotions, to the tune of $1400, or so I heard through the normally reliable office grapevine.

I work with a bunch of lunatics. And thank God for that, because if it were not for the heartfelt ponderings of my insane cubicle neighbors, which they verbalized as each of us dug deeply into our spirits to channel our inner single-digit (I actually thought of telling everyone that I was a zero, but figured it was too good a joke for these mopes - I now realize that it is not funny), I think I would have been bored to tears. The girl who searches for ipods and digital cameras all day on the internet dubbed herself "The Leader". My boss, who jettisons responsibility the way fascist dictatorships get rid of dissidents, is also, apparently, a Leader. When she declared herself a Leader, it set the tone for the day. I thought of North Korea, of that crazy guy with the bad toupee, Kim Jong Il, Dear Leader. My boss is Kim Jong Il in Ann Taylor office wear. Did she really believe that she is a Leader? Really?

And, more importantly, did she believe that any of the people seated around her, her reluctant supplicants and in one case, a friend, see her as a Leader? My mind bent in several ways to picture a place and time in which she would be considered a Leader. Perhaps if she was the only human with limbs, she'd be a Leader. Or if she were 70 feet tall. Hell, I wouldn't stand in her way. Or if she carried a laser that could slice people in half. Or, most difficult for me to picture, if she actually took the initiative to assist people in their work so that things got done. Alas, none of these scenarios is reality, so logic told me that, in promoting herself as a Leader, my boss had made a most inaccurate observation. Actually, the moment she revealed her personality type (as we all did eventually), I noticed a subtle shifting of posture among the ten or so of us in the room, as if Truth had just been bludgeoned before our very eyes and there was nothing we could do to stop it.

My office mate who resembles a weasel and writes bad poetry wrestled with the idea of being a Four (creative) or being an Eight (I think, I don't exactly remember). The person who is perhaps the craziest one in the office - and who I am convinced will have a flameout of a nervous breakdown one of these days - unhesitatingly christened herself a Six (Perfectionist). None of us questioned this one, overtly or otherwise. To do so would have invited hostility followed by defeat in our argument. And, really, what would we have been arguing about? No one in the room was prepared to present examples that contradicted our own self-assessments. I could have listed at least 43 instances in which my boss shunned the responsibilities of a Leader. Likewise, I probably could have dredged up one of the pornographic lyrics penned by the weasel-man, thus building my case against his artistic creativity. I should say that another colleague, who is a good friend and was equally amused-slash-horrified by the poor allocation of department funds on this teambuilding day, said that she was a Four, without any ceremony.

By the time it was my turn (I think that I was last), I am a bit ashamed to say that I was into this game. Partly because I felt like I could be whoever I wanted to be. If Ms. Kim Jong Il could be a Leader, then I could be Elvis, for Christ's sake, right? Naturally, I blew my chance to be intriguing, and I debated between labeling myself a Five (Investigator) or a Nine (Conciliator). Part of being a Nine is that you agree with what everyone else says, which I tend to do. The lunatics seated around me insisted that I am a Nine, and so I agreed, which further confirmed my Ninehood. Had I disagreed, I may have been a Five, I don't know. I don't care. As a Nine, I have trouble keeping my focus, and I am distracted by each little detail of a task that presents itself to me during the day.

After we assumed our new personae, we were given pop-psychological guidance over how we can harness our "types" to work positively in the workplace (the words "proactive" and "synergy" were mentioned more than once). We were given amusing examples of these types among the characters in hit TV sitcoms, like Seinfeld and Cheers (I was one of the only ones in the room who even remembered Cheers). It was right at about this time that I spied a tiny window, out the door of the insufferably small meeting room (which was the last place I'd pick to build my "team"), all the way on the other side of the building. I could see that it was snowing outside. I so wanted to be outside, away from this worthless exercise in self-denial. We were all avoiding the fact that our office is a complete mess and that we all hate our jobs and each other. Somehow, the white fluffy snow seemed like the perfect escape from this meaningless effort. Then my thoughts turned more absurd: why couldn't my boss have just let us take this day to do some errands, things that we have been putting off because we haven't had time. In the end, some honest-to-goodness errand completion would have done us all some good. I have some pants that I never got altered. I need to make an appointment for an MRI. I still owe two friends wedding gifts. What the hell am I going to get them? They don't want anymore housewares stuff, which is what I feel most comfortable getting them. Maybe a print, or a membership to Netflix. That's a great gift. Oh God, if you are merciful you will spirit me out of this room and into the fluffy snow. I closed my eyes and waited for deliverance...

Damn. All I saw before me was a bunch of people obviously uncomfortable with what was taking place, trying to strike their best "this is really interesting" posture. There were books on the Enneagram scattered about the meeting table, which indicated the phenomenon's impressive commercial reach. There was a book on Enneagram in the workplace, a well-worn book on the Enneagram in relationships (I failed to take note of which numbers I should avoid), and some others. From the facilitator we learned that a lot of businesses and offices seek her guidance on how to mold an office of team players out of the raw materials, each tagged one to nine. The cult of commerce has tapped into the Enneagram as one of its spiritual guides, and this lady was making a bundle off of it.

After lunch (which, like good team players, we paid for ourselves) we engaged in a survival exercise, in which we were trapped in the desert after a plane crash. Being stuck in the desert with my coworkers would be a sign of God's wrath, and the longer I would survive, the angrier I'd know that God was with me. Our task was to figure out a way to stay alive long enough so that we would be rescued. It didn't occur to me until later that my current job is a lot like the Mexican desert in which we were marooned in the exercise. I'm just trying to survive the place until another employer swoops out of the sky and takes me out of there.

The exercise itself was a disaster. We didn't make the right decisions, according to the choices made by an "expert", who was probably sitting in some warm cozy place right now, far from the desert and far from any teambuilding exercises. It was determined by the facilitator that we were not a good team when it comes to collective decision-making. Actually, this exercise was the first time that we had ever been asked to collaborate on something in the many months that we had been on the job. I think that the irony of this was lost on Ms. Kim Jong Il, who was probably listening to the military parade music in her head or thinking of some funny episode of Sex and the City.

We started to blame one another for the decisions that had been made, which, in the end, would have probably led to our over-roasting in the Nogales heat. Hey, I'm just a Nine. I had two Fours, an Eight, and a Six in my stranded group. You can't expect me to bail us out. After a few minutes of finger-pointing and dressing-down, the exercise, and the day, mercifully came to an end.

We filled out some evaluation sheets, and I completed mine in the most cursory manner, without comments, because I knew none of my input would matter. A few days later, we received an email with a tabulation of the evaluations. Indeed, the teambuilding day had been a success! The comments of my peers did not lie; people agreed that it was "interesting". Even weaselboy chimed in with a funny comment (which escapes my memory), indicative of either his gushing approval of the event, or perhaps of his dry derisiveness. I would bet on the former.