I know next to nothing about football. All I know is that my brother played it in high school and that Notre Dame can't seem to keep a coach for more than a couple of seasons. So forgive me if I am a couple of years behind the times. Apparently Reebok has a series of Terry "The Office Linebacker" Tate commercials that get shown during the Super Bowl. Now I've never seen the Super Bowl (yes, it's true and feel free to discuss my general un-Americaness and un-coolness) so I had no idea until my leadership professor showed one in class today as a demonstation in how not run a company. If you haven't seen these marvels of Madison Avenue--and surely I'm not the only one--then the basic premise is that a linebacker is hired to pummel the poor buffoons who work in an office into submission. It's funny but through violence, and I'm by nature not a violent person. So, Why am I so intrigued by this commercial? I've worked in that environment. You know those lists that fancy business magazines (i.e, Fortune) put out compiling the top 100 best and worst companies to work for? I worked for one that makes it to the "top" ten on the worst list almost every year. It also has one of the worst boards of directors. I've met them and I can honestly say that their purpose in life is to make low-level management cry. At times, I felt almost lucky to be a peon because at least we had the option of hiding from them as they did their walkthroughs. Let's just say that I have mastered the art of the well-timed coffee break. I think most people have worked jobs where they felt emotionally strained but this job was a level of hell that Dante should have chronicled. Make a list of every positive adjective you can think of and put the prefix "un" in front of all of them and you have my experience there. At one point, the average turnover rate in my department was two days (while I survived almost two years). What's sad is that since I've left my former co-workers (many of whom I keep in contact with) have told me it's gotten even worse. I couldn't imagine how until today when one of my leadership classmates, who still works in what I will lovingly refer to as the Corporate Gulag, turned to me after we watched the commercial and said, "Oh, now they're searching us as we leave work to make sure we haven't stolen anything."