Nach ✖️I gave a talk at Videobrains on office slides and symbolic leisure, and people brought me excellent stories afterward. Here are two:
[games company] had slide between two floors, & one day found they had to make 100 people redundant & close the bottom floor of their offices. They taped off the slide, & that wasn't enough to stop people using it; they kept sliding down into another company's office. Management put a "DO NOT USE" sign on it & people still kept using it. They stuffed it full of packing paper, & that worked, but the unusable slide was permanently there as a reminder of that time they laid off 100 people.
[startup] had a staircase with a glass wall beneath it, which people kept walking into. They decided to make the space under the stairs a ball pit, because ball pits are cool and people would then see the glass. Except they made a fake ball pit on the cheap by filling the space with boxes and putting ball pit balls on top and around the sides. Inside, the boxes were warm and dark, so in no time at all they had rats and their fake ball pit was filled with piss and shit.