Atlassian loves the movie Office Space. It’s a classic; it’s before its time, and it’s just so true. We know all the jokes about staplers, and we’ve even talked about having an Atlassian flair day. We’re that serious.
Last week, Office Space turned 16, and it feels as relevant today as it did in 1999. It’s crazy how little office culture has evolved since then. We still fight fax/printer/copier machines, cubicle farms cover swaths of corporate America, while information is locked away in people’s desktops or mailboxes. Sound familiar?
You don’t have to live your office lives like this anymore. Times have changed! Hipchat can solve these problems. (Well, maybe not fax/printer/copier machines and cubicle farms.)
I’m going to need you to come in on Saturday
Hipchat’s biggest hurdle is convincing folks why it’s important to break the habits they didn’t know they had. It’s easy to describe what Hipchat does–team chat, video, file sharing, searchable, emoticons, etc., etc. But the challenge is showing the benefits that materialize when your team adopts it.
That got us to thinking.
What would Bill Lumbergh do?
We needed someone to show the world that TPS reports don’t need a cover sheet. We needed the one guy to help explain that office culture has changed; we needed Bill Lumbergh to come back.
For the seven folks who’ve never seen Office Space, Bill Lumbergh is the boss. He’s an office cruiser, enforcing mundane policies and ruining people’s days with weekend assignments.
What would it be like to work for Bill today?
There was only one way to find out: we called him.
And, something weird happened–something borderline… magical. He agreed to get back on camera.
That’s right – Lumbergh is back!*
You’ll see more of him on atlassian.com over the next week. We hope you enjoy watching all the videos as much as we enjoyed filming them.
*Unfortunately, we could only get him to come back in the US only. Apologies to all of our international fans.