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Under New Management
It’s time to, as The Who said, “Meet the new boss!”
This piece appears in Work It: Quarterly Report, issue 1, and is adapted from a scene in the first episode of Work It on office romance.
After negotiations that were long, hard, and other words for cock, Work It is now under new management. It’s time to, as The Who said, “Meet the new boss!” Sounds good to us, but what does this all mean for Work It? Read on, genius.
Work It: Quarterly Report, Issue 01
An acquisition of this magnitude contains many lessons for the world of business. It’s like when Walt Disney purchased the animation studio founded by Mickey Mouse and then made him his slave. He forced the unfortunate rodent to star in movies and drive a steamboat. Millions were amused. Such is the power of business! It separates the men from the mice – a man has money, but a mouse seldom has the money. And that’s why this is a big deal.
But how did a earth-shattering mega-sale like this come together? I guess if you knew that, you wouldn’t be reading this, so sit down, shut up and let me tell you.
Work It had been on Westdale’s CFMU for only two episodes when the celebrated campus radio station was approached with a proposition.
Widget Media, a joint subsidiary of SodaStream International and the IDF, offered CFMU the world’s first negative six-figure deal to take Work It off their hands. CFMU, observing Work It’s trend line and cursing the day Sam and Janet were born, jumped at the chance to unload the satirical sketch program for a meagre $400,000, reallocated from gratuitous student union expenses like wellness and food.
The Takeover
Widget makes moves
Widget Media CEO, Todd Douchelman, announced the sale with a brief statement: “We are happy to be in the Sam & Janet Business. We look forward to their zany sketches and wacky sound effects being used to advance our strategic interests. It will be the same Work It as before, just with slightly less focus on the foibles of the modern workplace, and slightly more on selling home carbonation products and covering up the murder of protesters in Gaza. You’ll barely notice. Really.”
However, the Widget Media influence was quickly felt. New loyalty programs were established, resembling those of their widely panned, podcast-themed fast food chain, WidgetBurgers. (You may have heard about their products, the SM57 Shake and the GarageBandwich, which were both recently outlawed.) Work It began billing itself “home of the Big Yuk” and selling Work It Fun Club memberships, a controversial program where listeners had to pay a per-laugh surcharge. To listeners’ credit, the program has yet to bring in any money.
In the coming weeks, there were other tweaks. Sam and Janet didn’t freak, which made them look weak. At the newly-introduced and extremely mandatory morning meetings, Sam and Janet had to present fun facts about themselves. Foolishly, Sam said he plays guitar as his ‘fun fact’: “Charles Manson played guitar,” HR reminded him in their write-up. “You don’t want to be like Charlie, do you?” He was sent for a week in ‘the cooler’ to ruminate.
Work It was also tasked with promoting brand loyalty through song. Soon, every episode began with the Work It Corporate Anthem, as well as ending with it, and being frequently punctuated by it every few minutes too. Indeed, Sam and Janet were now spending most of Work It mindlessly crooning, “Work it, work it, hey hey hey / Work it, work it, happy day / We love to work it, yes we do / And we love to look out for the bottom line of Widget Media.”
Not All Bad
New perks at Work It
All of that aside, life under new management wasn’t all doom and gloom for Work It. Widget management introduced the “You’re Awesome!” award, given out hourly in recognition of the employee who had contributed the most to team morale in the previous 60 minutes. Janet, a noted corporate simp and coward, took home three in a single morning, while Sam, with his adolescent anti-authoritarianism intact at nearly 40, has received none and has instead been sent another half-dozen times to ‘the cooler’ to eat gruel and reflect on his shortcomings.
Eventually, Sam benefitted from ‘re-training.’ He returned with newfound zeal, saying how well Widget treats him while holding up the day’s newspaper.
Whether through genuine approval or merely under duress, Sam and Janet cheered as Widget introduced other incentives to help the Work It team hit their chuckle-quota each episode. Team members who came up short were placed in stocks in the atrium and pelted with tomatoes, cabbage, and countless parsnips.
(Parsnips grow incredibly well in Westdale, despite being unpopular with locals and not even planted in the first place. The scientific community remains baffled at the phenomenon and really quite scared.)
When Widget Media brought in Blackwater-style private military contractors to oversee the creation of each hilarious episode, at first there was concern among the team, but soon everyone involved with Work It was enthusiastic or missing.
What’s next for Work It? Mr. Douchelman said on behalf of Widget Media, “The future is written in blood.” Does this mean we can expect exciting new spin-offs or content verticals? Time will tell.
Sam and Janet also weighed in with their hopes for the relationship between Work It and their new management. Sam hopes that the new management team doesn’t mind the occasional joke at their expense, if it’s done in order to create funny and biting satire of late capitalism. For her part, Janet is hoping for a goblet made from Sam’s skull.
