the company-wide bingo game is ruining my life
I deserve to win
On January 28th, 2020, my company’s Workplace Team dropped off a bingo sheet on every employee’s desk. Technically each sheet had 3 bingo grids, so you had 3 different cards to actively play. Then they added us all to a Slack channel called “bingo.”
At first, the bingo channel was left open for all employees to chat in, which was clearly a mistake — there were 300 people freely messaging anything they could think of related to the wide, wide world of bingo. This lasted exactly one day.
Then came the formal announcement that the latest fun new initiative would be a company-wide game of bingo. Obviously we had figured this part out.
The shocking news: They would call one bingo number per day.
Immediately upon hearing this, my coworker Caleb handed me his bingo card and said, “Here, you look like someone who enjoys bingo.”
First of all, how dare you. I’m a deeply complicated multifaceted individual with a myriad of interests and hobbies. I contain multitudes. But yes, one of those multitudes is: I love bingo.
So now I had six cards, while all my inferior peers had a measly three. I was destined to win.
Each day’s bingo number is announced on Slack at noon. It took all of three days for my tiny little Pavlovian brain to offer a surge of dopamine as I gleefully checked my six cards — six! I was rich in possibilities! — for numbers. I always had at least one hit, usually more.
I took a work trip to San Francisco in late January, and dutifully packed my bingo cards along with my laptop and charger. The notification comes at 9 am in California, so I started each day with a brief body high from the joy of checking my cards.
Reader: I did not win bingo in January. Or February. Each winner announced was an insult. They had half the chances I did and still the bingo gods did not smile on me.
Then March came around, and you know where this story is going — our office shut down, technically for two weeks, but obviously we are still all working from home now, six months later.
At first, they suspended bingo, because apparently none of my coworkers had the soundness of mind to bring their cards into quarantine with them. Can you believe that?
Bingo was dead; there was no way to play virtually. A month passed.
Then our tech team announced they’d built an internal bingo website. We would each be assigned a bingo card & the game would begin anew on the following Monday.
This was the most crushing work-from-home blow I sustained. I went from six bingo cards to one. No one even seemed to notice how dramatically our bingo odds were slashed.
Even with this deeply inferior setup…bingo is my joy. I look forward to that dumb little dopamine rush every time I see the notification of the day’s new number. I can feel my stupid baby heart beat faster — it is identical to the sensation I used to get when my crush logged on to AIM after school. It is the same. I need it. It is my one joy.
The bingo announcement usually still comes around noon, but I am not going to mince words here: Sometimes, the Workplace Team forgets their solemn bingo duty and does not announce the number for hours. If it gets to 12:30 and I haven’t had my hit of serotonin, I admit I get upset.
Most days, I don’t have the bingo number that’s called. With fewer chances to win for all of us, the games last so much longer. A single game of bingo can take a month to play. Do you know how maddening that is? Bingo, my light in the dark, the wind beneath my wings, spread out over 30 days and I don’t even win.
After 5 winners are announced, they reset the game. They also insist on starting the game fresh on Mondays. Last week, the fifth bingo winner was announced on Tuesday morning. Tuesday! They made us wait all week for a new game.
I started so high, and I’ve fallen so far.
At the time of writing, I have not had any numbers called on my new bingo card. It’s been 10 days since I had my last bingo hit. I don’t know how much more of this I can take.
