A stressed employee unloads in the VICE office basement. Poppin’ off shots, yo!
Meet my friend Peter James. We went to school together and now he works in a mountain bike shop. He likes to walk around saying he really fucking hates hipsters and VICE (even though I don’t think he’s ever read or watched anything we’ve done). Anyway, I made up 24 revolting lies about VICE, emailed them to him and told him that some of them were true. When I called him up to talk about it he, amazingly, believed a bunch of them. What’s more, I wrote them in the style of a complete wanker on purpose but he didn’t even notice. That’s how much he hates me.
Lie 1: Recently, because we started making sick money, it meant we had to harsh up our vibes a bit. Among other things, we had to evict the squatters from the break room, get rid of the gun range in the basement and we weren’t allowed to have a dealer on the payroll anymore. Basically, they suck total dick.
Peter James: I don’t believe you had a gun range in your basement, but I totally can imagine you getting drugs on the payroll.
Lie 2: Every meeting at VICE starts the same: no shoes, no ties and all in on a heavy sesh of Guitar Hero (Sum 41’s classic “Fat Lip” is an office fave). If you can’t adhere to these terms – fuck you, square!
Again, it sounds like it’s gone a bit far here, but I know that some companies do the “no shoes” thing and I know you don’t wear a tie to work. I don’t know who Sum 41 are, so I can’t judge, but I bet you have Guitar Hero, so I’m saying yes.
Lie 3: We have an annual ironic Butlins trip.
Yes, totally.
Lie 4: Saskia, our in-house barrister, got her foot in the door by sending us her CV as a zine. Jamie, our denims editor, impressed us by breaking into our office overnight and spray painting his CV on the wall over our editor’s desk.
Yeah, I can totally believe all of that.
Lie 5: We used to have a weekly after-work fight club, but unfortunately a photographer sued us after he broke a rib, so we had to stop.
Urm. No, I don’t think any of you can fight.
Lie 6: At the office Christmas party a few years ago, a little girl died in the disabled toilet of our office (don’t ask!). Ever since, some mega weird shit has been happening that can’t be explained. We’re currently making a documentary about it. Watch out for it soon on VICE.com.
Obviously not.
Lie 7: Osama bin Hard-on is our office mascot. It’s one of those inflatable black-guy sex dolls wearing an Osama bin Laden mask and NOBODY comes into our office without getting their Polaroid taken with him.
Yeah. This is exactly the kind of student shit you guys would find hilarious.
Lie 8: Our other office mascot is a stuffed baby giraffe named Sid Vicious that lives in our reception area. A couple of years back, we sent the entire editorial department on a team-building hunting trip to some shithole in Africa. Sid Vicious is what they came back with.
I doubt you shot a giraffe, but I bet your place is full of taxidermy.
Lie 9: We once told an intern that if he got a facial tattoo of a pair of Oakleys, we’d give him a job. We were fucking around, but then he actually went out and did it.
No, that one is a lie, clearly.
Lie 10: Our most legendary prank is our annual Water Cooler Acid Roulette, in which one day per year, totes unannounced, we add LSD to the office’s water cooler.
Oh yes, of course, spiking the cooler. I can believe that.
Lie 11: Other faves include the time we gave the office cleaner the gross jar in a Chanel garment box for her birthday, and the time we filled a bottle of L’Oreal EverPure conditioner with hair removal cream and gave it to our beauty editor Aldene (or BALDene, as she’s now known LOL).
Probably.
You know you’re saying it’s all true, basically? Are you mad?
It sounds true to me.
Lie 12: We have a room full of vintage arcade games.
True.
Lie 13: We often hire in-office DJs to kick out da jamz. We’ve got a pretty sick selection of DJs on rotation. TNGHT and Kristen Stewart have residencies in our office. We get the crackheads from opposite the office to do the door (they’ll do it for basically nothing and you’d have to be mad to fuck with those scummers).
Again, I don’t know who those people are, but yeah, I reckon you have massive parties all the time.
Lie 14: We have an interior decorator on the payroll whose job is to make sure we have the sickest office in Silicon Roundabout. Maybe even the world. He gives the office a monthly “swag overhaul” – this month he put a fuckin’ tight Biggie and Tupac mural in the lobby and turned the editor’s office into a half-pipe.
Untrue. You had me up until the half-pipe.
Lie 15: No one is allowed to clean the whiteboard in Meeting Room 2. Banksy wrote on it during an ideas sesh and we haven’t cleaned it since. It’s a picture of the cast of Friends eating McDonald’s in a concentration camp.
Not true, though you probably tell people that to look cool.
Lie 16: Bouncy castles, live onstage artificial insemination, gang fights, heroin cupcake Russian roulette, celebrity mud wrestling, zorbing, live magic, death metal karaoke, disabled strippers – these are all things that have featured at recent VICE parties.
Yeah, sounds about right. What’s zorbing?
Running around in a massive inflatable ball.
Oh yeah. Totally.
Lie 17: As a gift, all new employees are given a solid gold cocaine straw engraved with the VICE logo.
No way. Maybe a bag of coke, though.
Lie 18: Weirdly, the other week we realised that almost every single member of our staff has a trust fund. We can’t figure out how that happened. I guess when you take the stress of making money off someone during their formative years, they have a whole bunch of extra time to focus on becoming a totally epic human being.
Oh fuck off, you smug cunts.
Lie 19: We have tattoos that say VICE SQUAD.
Do you have that? I hope you don’t have that.
Lie 20: The guy who writes our sneaker reviews is called Mϖkey.
Er, yeah, if he writes about trainers, he probably is called that.
Lie 21: We once fired a guy for repeatedly bringing in a packed lunch even though we kept telling him not to.
No, I don’t believe that. You’re an idiot, but you’re not mean.
Lie 22: And this other dickhead KEPT using an Acer laptop, despite us repeatedly asking him to buy a MacBook, so we sacked him too.
I don’t believe that either.
Lie 23: When we set up our new office, Hackney Council took over seven months to work out how to zone the fucker. No lie, they were all, “Is it an office? Is it a club? Is it a brothel?” To be honest, it really fucked up our work, but it was worth it for the kudos we get off the lads at Hackney Town Hall.
Fucking Hackney Town Hall is probably just as bad as VICE, so I’m saying YES. Fuck Hackney.
Lie 24: Our pub is called The Old Blue Balls.
Probably.
You know none of those were true?
Oh, really?
You didn’t wonder? We don’t have trainer reviews.
Well, I don’t read it, to be fair.
I mean, I wrote the email like a real dickhead on purpose and you didn’t question it? Did it even sound like me?
Well, kind of, I thought that might be the way you talk at work.
You’re a real dick. And a troll.
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