Take this job and love it

Is work fun? Sorry, FUN. Should it be and if so, why?

I was startled to read that the Poynter Institute, an admirable American thinktank that tracks, teaches and studies journalism, had hired an energetic CNN employee who either rewarded them for the decision or took a terrible revenge. She urged Poynter to study — for an entire week — the concept of fun in workplaces, specifically newsrooms.

There are photos of the results. A Kansas City news director brought crayons to a meeting and told reporters and editors to use them, which they did, glumly. A group of feature writers in an unidentified newsroom wore superhero T-shirts to work. I see six relentlessly chirpy women — picture Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt — and two men looking a bit frozen.

Poynter people went along with the gag. I have actual photos of masking-tape hopscotch at Poynter, though apparently no one agreed to be photographed hopping.

The person behind this is Katie Hawkins-Gaar, who found seven years of CNN layoffs a downer, quite naturally. She left profit-hopeful journalism to try to inject joy into workplaces from a distance, via things such as three “effer- vescent women” presenting hour-long webinars on fun.

“We never would have guessed that KCUR would bring puzzles to work or turn a boring conference table into a spot to play ping-pong. We couldn’t have expected the St. Louis Review would launch Nerf darts at each other or mix up non-alcoholic cocktails.” Fine. Wonderful.

But here’s my problem. In my immediate work future are pieces on the Slender Man girl-kill, Margaret Thatcher (maybe), the Chinese stock market collapse, Stephen Harper in the woods with a podium and a raccoon update.

Fun seems . . . out of place, the red jelly bean on a desert floor, the stuffie at a murder scene. I discussed my skepticism with Hawkins-Gaar (I have never met a Katie I disliked. Name your daughters accordingly), and considered the studies and TED talks she recommended on how adults become more creative when they think like children.

The question journalists ask when embarking on a news story is “What is the fresh angle?”

And if I think from a child’s viewpoint about the passengers who took down a gunman on a French train, my fresh angle is the train guards who ran away and hid behind an iron door. Children ask who will protect them. It’s not Frenchmen. But nobody mentioned this. So yes, it works.

But thinking like children is one thing, behaving like them is another. My quarrel is with the idea of fun itself. I dislike the word. Children have fun. Adults have pleasure.

Allergic to fun, I rejoiced to see Banksy produce his new Dismaland, a dystopian theme park of failure and grime in West- on-super-Mare in England that parodies Disneyland’s brightly coloured demand that fun must be had, that adults must revert to semi-idiocy. Speaking of which, why does Donald Trump wear a red baseball cap? He is 69.

“Love and work . . . work and love, that’s all there is,” Freud said. Work is an adult realm, as is parenthood. Work is grim but they pay you. That’s why they call it “work.”

Hawkins-Gaar is adding sugar to the work mix. But you know what the real sugar would be: a raise. And it isn’t going to happen in a turbulent era that has taken every form of media and shaken them to the point of shaken baby syndrome. It isn’t fun, it isn’t even faintly pleasant.

Take the mug shot that accompanies this column. The Star mandated new ones be taken; you may be shocked how much some staffers have changed since 1976. What I think about the coming new one is that I should go into real estate. Study realtors’ photos and everyone’s wearing a manic grin. Why? The house has dry rot, the neighbour’s a pedophile and the roof has moss on the inside, but it’s a steal at $1.2 million.

That’s the state of things. If this crash leaves your employer with unfunded pension liabilities, Ping-Pong won’t help. Hawkins-Gaar admits Fun at Work Week didn’t quite work. “When it came to enrolment, revenue and engagement, we missed the mark.”

But she’s right, it was worth trying. I had huge fun writing about failing at fun, largely because newsrooms attract misanthropes like me. Call me a start-up, a work in progress, but I will have fun, or die trying. hmallick@thestar.ca