Just thinking about game show day brings me back to a moment when life was so silly and perfect that I almost can't stand it.
When I was still working as a producer, we would occasionally produce a game show in place of our regular weekly town hall at YouTube. It would happen before a long holiday weekend and was modeled after old game shows like Family Feud and Wheel of Fortune -- but, sometimes we would do trivia, or a drawing game, etc.
The content for the show would come from the comms team and would often come together late, and delivered to us on Google workplace products (that were never intended for game show creation), which meant that things didn't always go how we would hope and setting up and testing was pretty chaotic. Stuff would break, people would yell, the pressure felt very high, and there was no way to manage it before we knew more about what the system could do with the content we were given. We would end up with some frustrated and anxious crew members that eventually came to deeply hate game show day.
I learned fast that this kind of day required a very specific crew, and that I would need to mentally prepare them for the chaos, and for how they could personally make or break the day for themselves and everyone else. So, one day I clumsily tried giving this little speech before diving into the details of the show:
"Helloooo, thank you for coming today. Today is game show day! So, game show day tends to be a very stressful day, but it could actually be maximum amounts of fun, depending on you and your attitude. The show will come together late, so know that it will be okay if things aren't perfect -- and, in some cases that will be a part of the fun. We'll just have to do our best to follow the bouncing ball, and it might feel a little crazy at times, but this can actually be a really fun day!".
I wasn't sure if my words made an impact until an hour later when, John, one of my crew members, walked up to me and said, dryly, "So, are we going to have maximum amounts of fun today."
Did I say 'maximum amounts of fun'...? 😬 The realization was immediately uncomfortable, but there was nothing I could do about it, so I quickly owned it and replied with, "THAT'S UP TO YOU, JOHN!!". 😅
The ridiculousness of my speech did seem to inspire some ease, so I doubled down on 'maximum amounts of fun' for following game show crew chats, eventually finding more confidence and adjusting it to something like, "Today can be a very stressful day, or it can be what, John?", at which point John would say, dryly, "maximum amounts of fun", and I would reply with, "YES. Maximum amounts of fun, but it's up to YOU!"
I saw John recently, after not seeing him since before the pandemic. When he walked up, I said, "Hey, John, did you have maximum amounts of fun today?" He laughed and said, "Aw, I miss that!"
