A Teen Started A Facebook Community Parodying Adult Life. And Then Adults Ruined It

On this week's episode of Reply All: how a teenager reacts when his parody of adulthood gets overrun by adults.

Thomas Oscar is an Australian 17-year-old with a lot of time on his hands. One of the ways Thomas passes his time is by creating deliberately lame Facebook groups. Like Facebook groups for mushroom foraging enthusiasts. The kind of jokes you tell only to make yourself laugh. And last summer, Thomas established a group called Generic Office Roleplay to mock the lamest thing he could think of: corporate culture.

Thomas appointed himself CEO of his newly founded company, Stackswell and Co. He invited his friends to the group and started accepting applications for made up positions within the company. The soon had everything from an office dress code to HR regulations, environmental policies, and an inventory spreadsheet. He ordered the group's members to format all posts with a subject line and list the message's sender and its recipients.

Thomas created Stackswell as a means to ridicule the banality of office life – of adult life. And considering it began as just Thomas and a bunch of a teenage friends, he managed to get the corporate voice of interoffice communication surprisingly well. But Stackswell and Co. grew quickly and, as it expanded, it attracted new members who didn't get the joke. The new Stackswell employees were not teenagers. They were adults, many of whom worked in offices and participated in the same corporate culture Thomas set out to mock.

And with new (old) employees came new jokes. Hammy, over the top, dad jokes that infuriated Thomas. One joke in particular got to him:

The iguana joke took off. People started making variations on the iguana joke, like the sexual harassment policy for iguanas, or iguanas are stealing my cigarettes. Thomas had had enough.

On this week's episode of Reply All: how a teenager reacts when his parody of adulthood gets overrun by adults.​

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