24
ESCAPE ROOM

We had a department summit to receive training on various topics and also bond as a team. The training sessions were dry, but social events in the evening kept the team engaged. The organizers had been tasked with organizing fun events on a tiny budget, so I didn’t have high hopes. The first evening was supposed to be a cocktail hour with some snacks. It didn’t quite live up to that description. We were jammed into a back room (cellar?) with plastic tables along the sides. When food trays came out almost an hour after we arrived, the hungry mob devoured everything and unsurprisingly they ran out of food.
When day 2 came around, we all packed snacks in anticipation of bing starved again during the next social event. It turned out the pre-dinner activity was an escape room. We were preassigned into groups that appeared very random, but in reality, the organizers tried to mix people from different teams with guest speakers and so forth. I got assigned to a fairly eclectic group that I had hardly interacted with previously, with the majority of folks never having done an escape room before. While most people got the hang of it, there was one particular group member who didn’t quite grasp the concept. She wandered from corner to corner, staring at the walls in search for a clue or escape hatch, with an out-loud running commentary the whole time. She also didn’t discern between the group’s personal belongings and the escape room props. At one point, she dug through the stack of jackets in the corner to check for clues. Nobody stopped her as we were all happy that she stopped wandering and talking. 
She took a keen interest in one of the group’s jackets - a denim jacket to be precise - and started inspecting the seams, turning the pockets inside out, and looking underneath the tags. She was incredibly intent on finding a clue in the jacket, I’d bet she would have torn the item apart with a seam ripper if she had had one handy. Thankfully, someone mentioned to her that the jackets weren’t clues, just our personal belongings. Despite this entertaining, unhelpful clothing inspector on our team, we managed to escape. I guess slow torture does work after all...we were all motivated to get out by her pacing and blabbering!