The Schmoopy Awards

I thought I came up with it but I’m told I stole it from Seinfeld.

Wait. I’ll back up.

Our CEO wanted us to introduce Team Popularity Awards. Ahem. I mean Team Member of the Month Awards as voted by other members of the Oracle Tree team. I’ve always hated stuff like that. Partially because it’s just so corporate (yes, I did say that with a spit of venom. I dislike corporations. I’m fine with SMEs. Love em. Real people doing real things. Corporations are just pure evil in my mind… but that’s a subject for another time.) It’s also probably because I’ve never won anything myself. BUT, CEO gets what CEO wants as that is the privilege of command, so I had to implement it.

Because HR has to do that kind of stuff when the CEO wants it. Sigh. But, I did retrieve a little bit of power. I said that, if I had to make it happen, I should get to name it. That was agreed to (Suckers!!! Bahahaha!) and so I tried to come up with the stupidest sounding name for the awards that I could.

Enter “Schmoopies” – A Stroke of Dumb Brilliance

So…. Schmoopies. It had such a dumb cuteness to it that nobody could take it seriously. In my mind it was perfect. I did honestly think it was an original idea. Curse you Seinfeld for coming up with my original thought twenty years before I did! Probably how he stole all his jokes. Some kind of time machine, I suspect.

So anyway, people could get to be nominated as the Schmoopiest member of the OT team and that would mean they could happily call themselves that month’s Schmoopy. At the end of the month, the call is made in the chat room for everyone to come and nominate someone for the following month and the circle continues.

The rewards for being so Schmoopalicious are that you get to wear a pretty purple banner on your profile pic and donate some money in your name to Buy 1 Give 1 which, if you haven’t heard of it, is a wonderful website where you can choose from a bunch of very worthy causes all over the world. It’s a charity that we wholeheartedly support at Oracle Tree and have done for many years.

The purple banner was chosen for its obnoxious and eye watering grossness. Again by me for similar reasons as previously explained. It’s based loosely on the costume that Edward Norton wore in Death to Smoochy. You know…. Schmoopy, Smoochy. They sound kinda similar. That set me off on that little design path.

The Schmoopy Legacy

I think since its inception, the Schmoopy Award has been given to pretty much every team member with the exception of our CEO. I guess it’d just feel weird and wrong to make her wear the purple. Though she will always be the Schmoopiest in our hearts.

Anyway, as meaningless popularity contests go, it has seemed to be embraced by our entire team and I think everyone gets a little excited to see who’s going to get the award each month. And of course, what they are going to choose as their charitable donation. So, it’s a win for the team and it’s a win for those in need.

If you’d like to see who our Schmoopy is this month, check out our About page.