Spitballs for the 21st-Century Office
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On the fields of office warfare, the workers' trenches are cubicles. Their weapons: "geek toys." The enemy: office stress. Fortunately, the fighting isn't as fierce as it sounds -- just co-workers blowing off steam with games and pranks. What's new is the technology.
Enter San Antonio-based KlearGear.com, which has supplanted the paper football with tech-savvy toys such as the computer-controlled USB Missile Launcher. For a mere $54.99, a worker can aim and fire up to three small foam missiles at co-workers from a rotating launcher, with only the click of a button on a keyboard.
The missile launcher is the most recent release in KlearGear's "cube warfare" line, said the company's president, Will Bermender. The arsenal includes rubber-band machine guns and fake hand grenades and snowballs. The so-called weapons "are certainly not appropriate for all workplace environments," Bermender noted, but "there are a lot of shops where they find" that the toys "really lift morale."
Demand has shot up in recent months, he said. Many orders come from large companies buying toys for their employees. Companies "recognize that workplace stress is just increasing every year," Bermender said. "The office toys, the cube-warfare toys . . . it's not going to be a cure-all, but they can be a quick hit."
-- Matthew C. Wright
A Dream House, and a Nightmare Tax Bill
Winning a brand-new dream home? Great. Paying property taxes on a multimillion-dollar house? Not so great. Just ask Donald P. Cook of Alum Creek, W.Va. He was this year's winner of "Dream Home" from HGTV, which gave away a 5,700-square-foot residence in Lake Lure, near Asheville, N.C.
The problem with winning such a big, beautiful home is that you also have some pretty big taxes, in this case, more than $19,000 annually. Cook figured that even the $250,000 he also won from the show won't last very long with such expenses. So instead of packing up and moving to North Carolina, the winner has decided to sell the dream home to the developer. The profits should help him to buy a home back in West Virginia.
Cook, a West Virginia state employee said, "It was a once-in-a-life experience -- HGTV treats you really nice. I just wish I could afford to live in a $2 million house."
-- Jill Bartscht
