‘It’s gonna be like Lord of the Flies’: Employee turns workplace into a battleground as he finds ingenious way to pit co-workers against each other

They say truth is stranger than fiction, but in this case one brave worker bee’s galaxy-brained attempt to liven up his job has ended up feeling like something from a lost episode of The Office.

TikTok user shinestythreads aka Duke revealed that for March this year he decided to launch his own version of March Madness, pitting his co-workers against each other in not exactly basketball but something with a similar flavor. Without any ado, Duke simply posted the March Madness table he drew up in his workplace’s chat and dropped the bombshell on everyone that they would be competing in a friendly contest… which apparently soon morphed into a cross between the Jimmy Jabs from Brooklyn Nine-Nine and The Hunger Games.

As per Duke, the rules were simple: everyone had until Monday to play an online paper toss game and share the screenshot of their highest score. The winner of each set would go through to the next round and so on. In a nice touch, the ultimate winner would get a prize tailored specifically to them. e.g. one of Duke’s co-workers collects Blu-rays so Duke would buy him a Blu-ray from his Amazon wishlist.

On the one hand, you might think Duke started this to build camaraderie between the team, but clearly the competition unleashed something primal in his co-workers as the smack-talking started even before he’d laid down the rules. “By the time I’m done with this it’s gonna be like Lord of the Flies,” Duke joked — we think. It’s possible he actually devised all this as some kind of social experiment. Or maybe he’s trying to take down his company from the inside. “Duke has finally found the perfect way to tank the whole company’s production,” one of his co-worker’s quipped.

TikTok has quickly become as obsessed with this contest as Duke’s office. “I am far more invested in this version of March madness then the real one,” one commenter admitted. Others, however, wished that Duke had been even more chaotic with the competition. “I was really hoping you’d just select winners with absolutely no explanation, periodically updating matchups throughout the week,” one said. “I thought you were gonna rank them just based on how you felt and I was ALL IN,” offered another.

Well, for those wanting added chaos, you won’t be disappointed by how the games escalated. The challenge changed with each new round and for the semi-finals the four left standing hand to spin the most interesting object possible on their finger like a basketball. Two of the objects chosen included the ashes of someone’s dead cat and… Duke’s own girlfriend, strung up from a tree.

Duke might want to be careful, though, as someone else revealed that they had tried something similar once upon a time and it did not go well for them. “I came up with a game called hallway hockey puck roll,” one response read. “Set up water bottles like bowling pins and had to roll a hockey puck to knock them down. HR called me into the office the next day.”

We don’t know exactly where Duke works, but it could well be a branch of Dunder Mifflin, the Pawnee Parks Department, or another setting of a sitcom created by Mike Schur. Let’s just hope his boss is more of a Ron Swanson and not a Robert California. We’re going to need this to become an annual tradition on a par with B99‘s Halloween Heists.