Water features? Pah.
An Irish law firm has hit upon a unique selling point to attract new employees: a big yellow slide.
Gallagher McCartney Barry installed the play equipment in its Donegal office and can now shoot staff and clients directly from the first floor into the reception.
After it was unveiled the firm posted a video of partner Grattan Butler enjoying the GMB Express, and the result is as wholesome an introduction to 2024 as anyone could want.
Yeeeeey!
The firm is understandably proud of its USP and has dedicated a page of its website to the slide called “How we enjoy life”.
“Enjoy the ride/one more slide”, it states. “Life is too short, the proof is in our slide! Join us.”
Glide/Against the Tide (needs work).
It's now using the slide to tempt in play-starved solicitors. A recent advert for a vacancy in the Donegal office extolled the virtues of “a career that requires you to enjoy your work, consider the environment, improve how you work everyday, care about work-life balance and most of all go down the slide”.
“I wondered what 'the slide' meant”, said a source who happened across the advert. “A typo perhaps or maybe some quaint local Donegal saying”.
But no, GMB has an actual slide, easily trumping the bean bags and fuzzball tables that other firms chuck in the corner to look like Google.
Comments
43
0
My office is on the 10th floor. I demand a helter skelter.
37
0
This is awesome. I shall campaign for one in our office,
22
1
FFS
87
1
imagine getting berated by a parter and he then goes and slides down that thing
50
1
"CrouchingLiger 19 January 24 09:25
imagine getting berated by a parter and he then goes and slides down that thing"
Maintaining eye contact until the last second they disappear into the depths..!
Also an excellent way to show out the other side's lawyers after a meeting - "and this is the way out...what do you mean? It's the quickest way to reception." Cue their team, their client, and very senior counsel entering The Slide(TM) one-by-one, leaving any shred of dignity at the top as they do so. Only bettered if one of them slams into the back of counsel who was too slow getting off it, creating a slide traffic jam, where they all then need to scoot along on their bums to get out.
If I was this firm, I'd livestream it.
25
1
Our managing partner should be thrown down a slide head first.
You know who you are Steve.
18
1
This actually might make me go into an office more often - whee
8
1
Only a very few Google offices actually have slides. I was both disappointed and a bit relieved to find this out.
I mean, I already feel enough of a fool showing myself up at table football (because it's there, I feel oddly compelled to use it, despite being crap) - a slide would take it to another level (pun intended). On the other hand, beats waiting for a lift.
17
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With family from just north of Donegal, can confirm this will have been received as the best thing since cooked potatoes.
23
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Anything to avoid an awkward lift conversation I suppose
16
1
I know this is paradise
Everyone old has dreamed of all their lives—
Bonds and gestures pushed to one side
Like an outdated combine harvester,
And everyone young going down the long slide
29
1
As a 49 year old person, I regard this as utterly pathetic.
At the same time, I would definitely have a go.
22
0
I'm a salaried partner in my 40s and I would LOVE an office slide. This along with many other reasons is probably why they won't make me an equity partner.
12
0
Can we just keep work places professional? FFS!
9
1
I was watching Stephen Spielberg's Life on Our Planet and got really inspired by it. The profession is just like evolution. First the trainee solicitors were fragile like the jellyfish. Then, the SRA gave them diff cult SQE tests and work flexibility and training choices, which are like the hard armers of the trilobites' only penetrable by the common ancestor of squids and octopi (perv partners). And then, the ancestor of fish came along, the first to develop a backbone. Watch it, it's emotional.
13
0
I still have fond memories of a (very expensive) fashion store in Munich that had a wooden slide down to the basement where the kids stuff was. I would pester my parent to go there.
So, yeah, my 50plus self would definitely have a go! (And be ashamed how much more of a coward I have become in the last 40 years).