Office Tailgating: A New Dimension to Casual Fridays

Offseason. No football and no tailgating. You sit in your cubicle or office and start to realize how empty your life actually is. Despair no longer, office worker! GatorTailgating has the solution: Office Tailgating®!

Offices are perfect locations for your standard tailgate. You have a parking lot. You have a patch of grass to set up horseshoes or ladder golf. Best of all, by the time Friday rolls around, you and your fellow office mates are ready for the weekend. Start it off early with a tailgate. Pull your car up, fire up the grill, and turn on the music.

Follow these steps to make your first office tailgate a success

1. Get your grill. You have a couple options here. If your office will allow it, purchase one and keep it onsite. Then every Friday, you just wheel it out and fire it up. Propane grills work best when you only have an hour. Another possibility is to get an electric smoker. You set it up, put your meat in there, and walk away. Set it, and forget it! The temperature is electronically regulated. Get four or five hours of smoke on a couple racks of ribs and you are good to go.
2. Be selective. Don’t invite your entire office building. You only want the people who know what they’re doing. Establish your rhythm and procedures of the office tailgate before you invite the people who aren’t regular tailgaters. Make sure that people know it’s not a work function. You also want people who are going to contribute. You don’t want moochers. Keep in mind that this is a tailgate not an office picnic. You also want people to join as they see what’s going on, and want to be a part of it.
3. Prep just like you would for a real tailgate. If you need to go shopping for special ingredients, do it. If you need to season your meat or marinate your chicken overnight, do it. Tailgating without prep work is bound for failure. Keep in mind that your one hour tailgating window is small, so there is no room for error. Be ready.
4. Bring activities. Office Tailgating is meant to break up the day and get you away from work. Your bosses won’t give you too much crap for setting up a game of horse shoes? If they say something, tell them that you’re “team building”.
5. Watch sports. You don’t have time to set up a satellite. Get the DVD from the championship and throw it in a laptop. You should make this as close to a real tailgate as possible.  

If you think that this is hard sell for your boss give him a speech about team building and how you barely know anyone in your office. Tell him or her that you really want to get to know the people in the other departments. You shouldn’t have a problem getting his approval.

Bring a new dimension to casual Fridays! Tailgate at work.

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Rusty Thompson is a contributor to GatorTailgating.com. Check it out for all types of great tailgating articles and tips and Gator football news and coverage!