Foot Sushi

In almost any other company, team building would mean a corny workship where you do ridiculous exercises like falling blindfolded into each other's arms or making a human pyramid. Here it means a mandatory marathon session of manicures and pedicures at a fancy Gold Coast spa.

Which is fabulous, unless you are the one girl in the entire world who can't stand that crap. I'm sorry, but the idea of someone picking at my feet for an hour is not relaxing, it is skeevy. I've had exactly one manicure in my life and it took all my willpower to let the lady finish. Why on god's earth would I encourage someone to shove a sharp stick under my cuticles and cut off pieces of my skin with tiny little scissors?

Every Tuesday a massuese comes to the office to give nearly-free rubdowns. I do not partake in this either. One girl told me he massaged her butt for half an hour once. "Your body is telling me this area needs special attention," he explained. What? I would have maced him.

So, yesterday's team building session was ... a challenge. We ordered in sushi, which I LOVE, but I took a pass on climbing up in the big pedi chair. Instead I sat in a corner shoveling in sashimi and feeling like the world's biggest ingrate. Here someone was trying to do this nice thing for me and all I could think about was the fact that I'm eating raw fish three feet away from someone who is having her callouses sloughed off. So I did what any team player would do.

I ditched. Grabbed my purse, flagged down a taxi and hauled ass back to the safety of the office.

Hopefully next time we can just do whirlyball.