Lyle was displeased. Despite all he had going for him — being the most handsome guy in the office, the smartest guy on the team, having the best all-terrain tires throughout the whole department, and trouncing the competition in a recent laser tag game, his team didn't seem to work well together.

Clearly, Lyle wasn't the problem. He was the best manager, the best leader, hell, the best human being there had ever been. And it was up to him to make his team happy. The laser tag game could have been a good first step if James W. hadn't ruined everything by exposing Lyle as a cheater. To his team's delight, Lyle sent out an email that he'd be at the regional office for a few days on management training. Lyle must have been doing something right, because as soon as he left the office got more productive.

Lyle's training included an introduction to the FISH! philosophy (pronounced "fish factorial"). For the peasants that haven't heard of FISH!, it was born out of Seattle's Pike Place Fish Market. The employees there were always smiling and laughing as they threw fish to eachother to fulfill orders, which made customers happy. And extra hungry for Tilapia, apparently, because they'd buy a whole shipload of fish.

That's it, Lyle reasoned. People aren't having enough fun at work! And he knew just the solution. He put his new team-building plan in action the day he returned from his training.

Instead of a call or an email, team members found out that Lyle was back in town by getting whanged in the back of the head with a Nerf missile, followed by Lyle cheerfully congratulating himself in third person. "Lyle, way to shoot Sylvia while she was trying to finish her reports! How are you so good at this Lyle? Well, Lyle, I guess I was just born incredible!" Or it could have been that he was shooting from near-point-blank range.

Lyle embraced all of the tenets of the FISH! philosophy that he could distill to "shoot employees with Nerf gun." When Wikipedia says "some employees find these techniques ridiculous and demeaning," I think it's specifically referring to Lyle's warped interpretation.

Lyle's plan to liven up the office was, as far as he understood it, brilliant. Lyle was certainly having more fun at work — and it was fun when his employees that pretended to be annoyed by getting hit with a Nerf gun, and then pretended to just want to get work done, and pretended that they thought Lyle was a complete boob (and kept the joke going for their whole tenures). It's nice to have people laughing with you!

James had grown less and less patient with Lyle's childish antics. While most of Lyle's staff feared his temper, James and his friend Brian had found a subtle way to deal with it — open, unabashed mockery. They wouldn't let him live down the fact that he'd sabotaged the laser tag game, nor that the net result of his expensive management training course was him showing up to work with a Nerf gun. Lyle found this to be very un-FISH! and would storm out of the room upset, taking it out on his staff in an orgy of Nerf-based violence.

Still, James had to admit that maybe Lyle had been on to something, so he and Brian went out to lunch that day, choosing a restaurant specifically because it was near a Toys-R-Us. After eyeing the available arsenal of foam-based weaponry, James decided on a three-chambered, 4 D-battery powered, rapid firing, twelve pound behemoth.

James's new toy kept Lyle quiet for a while, but word is that Lyle's been working day and night in his garage, assembling a tank made entirely of Nerf.

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