Secret lives are supposed to be exciting—an accountant plays in a rock band on the weekends, a shy legal assistant is a vibrant social butterfly on Second Life. But then there’s the Facebook group Generic Office Roleplay, a place where people can go to escape their boring routine by exchanging fake e-mails with their fake co-workers at a fake faceless corporation.
According to Gawker, the group is the brainchild of an Australian teenager named Thomas Oscar, who created it as part of a competition over who could start the most “wack” Facebook group. But soon the group, initially composed of Oscar and his friends, was overrun by actual office workers looking to pass the time between Sunday Fundays and death. Eventually those same cubicle-dwellers staged a coup, and Oscar was replaced as CEO of the group last week. (He did receive a $25 severance package on the way out.) Now the “employees” of “Stackwell & Co.” are free to exchange “emails” like this one, presumably to avoid exchanging emails like this one, without being harassed by teenagers:
Clearly, the whole thing is done with tongue planted firmly in cheek—the only links allowed in the Generic Office Roleplay group are from our sister site The Onion, “because they’re the only site I can think of that would have anything relevant to this page.” That, and email forwards of funny dog pictures.