Free Lunch

I used to wonder why white-collar workers in America jumped at every opportunity to attend a conference somewhere. But I finally figured out the real reason why office workers flocked to conferences like flies took to shit way before conferences were even called conferences. I was in the know and even hip about the secret world of conferences and the underground cult of conference goers when most conferences were still called “conventions”.

A convention was an overnight conference held in a hotel in some far away town. Convention goers were bored office workers and frustrated white-collar middle managers who needed a little break from their daily paper-pushing routine and a lot of eagerly anticipated, devilish diversion in someone else’s back yard. Have fun and let someone else clean up the mess afterward became America’s new service-industry corporate motto. This went hand-in-hand with America’s new white-collar corporate mission: Don’t get caught.

When paper-pushing was tossed out the service industry door in the 1990s, along with the single-tasking “pencil necks” who earned their living via telephones and filing cabinets, a new age of multi-tasking “computer keyboarders” and e-mail processors took over. Still, they got just as bored and frustrated as anyone else and needed a night or two on the town. Somebody else’s town, that is, and at the company’s expense. So, they invented "conferences" because the word sounded more progressive and high-end. After all, pencil necks went to conventions to skip convention meetings and to play poker all night long, if a tawdry one-night stand or a schoolboy shaving cream battle wasn’t in the offing. Computer keyboarders, on the other hand, would attend conferences mainly to “eat free food”. As Y2K approached, the all-you-can-eat buffet replaced lascivious carousing and unfettered mischief in white-collar corporate America.

When America’s service industry discovered that its over-tasked office staffs were signing up in droves for free food, managers stopped planning so many big-budget conferences and started offering conferences on the other side of town. Lavish business conferences became simple day-trips to a prepaid food trough.

Windows 95, therefore, spawned the biggest service industry perk of all time. White-collar workers had finally found their gastro G-spot. And no one ever looked back.

Like Disco, the “Free Lunch” had arrived.