Is The Barstool (Chicago) Office A Day Care Or A Barn?
I'm usually of the mindset that calling out your teammates publicly is bad for the overall morale and prosperity for the group. "Praise publicly, criticize privately" as EOS has taught me. Basically the total opposite of how Portnoy operates. But to each their own.
Something happened today that I just couldn't sit by and not bring to the world's attention.
I've been up in Birmingham, Michigan the past couple of days (saw Barry Sanders driving down Hamilton Row outside Commonwealth this morning, no big deal) for work for one of my other ten jobs, and to visit one of my best friends from college, Keith, who just got engaged. We went to Mabel Gray (a restaurant Francis recommended- blog coming soon) and Gray Ghost, drank some amazing old fashioned's, some excellent wine, played with his new puppy. It was a grand old time.
I was at this coffee shop working this morning and doing zoom calls before getting on the road back to Chicago when I got this outrageous email in my barstool inbox.
I cropped out the sender because I don't want to drag them into this, and because they're probably already been given enough grief by the guilty parties. (One thing about this place and expecting people to act like adults and be responsible, is it's usually not met with the most appreciation. I will no doubt get treated like the class tattle-tale when I walk into the office tomorrow morning for penning this blog.)
But that email blew my fucking mind.
And not in a good way.
One thing that has never sat well with me, and will never sit well with me, is people who have zero respect for other people and the service jobs they do. In this case, our sweet custodian/cleaning lady Isabel.
This lady busts her ass every day, around the clock, cleaning up every square inch of the office because the 100+ people who work there are children incapable of cleaning up after themselves.
Picture the game whack-a-mole. Or digging a hole in sand. Now picture doing that every single day of your life.
Living hell right?
Well, that's Isabel's job.
You'd think people would see that and maybe take the extra 2-5 seconds it takes to throw something in the trash or put things back where they found them. But that's asking a lot.
I think that a simple rule to try and live by is leave things better than you found them.
But if all of that wasn't bad enough, we have some piece of shit having explosive diarrhea in the men's bathroom and leaving the mess for somebody else (Isabel) to deal with.
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Personally, I'd find out who this person was, hand them a toothbrush and some Klorox bathroom cleaner, and assign them to bathroom cleaning duties (all four of them) for the entire month of February. Then see how funny they think it is. But I'm guessing like most of the mongoloids who work around here, they wouldn't even know the first thing about manual labor.
Which brings me to my point, and a question I find myself asking far too often, and that is, "how many people who work for Barstool could actually cut it in the real world?"
Serious question.
What would most of these people do if Dave and Dan didn't subsidize them and let them live in fantasyland like we have it? "Spoiled" isn't even close to the right word for it.
We have it so good here it's insane.
And not just from a close-to-zero-accountability standpoint. Barstool's benefits and health insurance are incredible. Dave pays everybody roughly 110% more than he paid us back in the Milton/Stoolapalooza/Blackout days. We have like 50 people who write around here. So you'd think we get like 100+ blogs a day on the site right? Ok, maybe just 1 per person per day. That's not asking much. Nate and Hubbs gave up sending emails begging and pleading people to write more because they fell on deaf ears. Any other company heads would roll.
I've been here like 20 years and I think I've lost count how many times a version of this blog that Nicky Smokes put up today has been written in that time. Has to be 15-20.
We're talking about work hours?
Can you imagine penning an email like that and hitting "send all" on it to your company?
And I'm not a Nicky Smokes hater by any means. He doesn't necessarily portray it on the blog or social media, but he's actually a really good kid.
But I think over the past year he got soft by being around this shit everyday. Dan and Dave are too nice and put up with too much. We need to get Taffer to come drop by the frat house office. He'd shut this shit down so fast your head would spin.
p.s. - I have a great new show idea for us. Let's take Barstool personalities and send them out onto worksites to work blue-collar jobs, mic'd up and with camera crews. Just like Dirty Jobs with Mike Rowe. Tell me that wouldn't do huge ratings and cause almost as many breakdowns as Surviving Barstool did.