In April 2017, Plex, an American streaming company, organised a corporate retreat for its 120 remote staff members.
CEO Keith Valory told the Wall Street Journal in a recent interview that the idea was to fly everyone out to Honduras, lean into a “Survivor”-style theme, and give a fully remote team something real to connect over. “We usually go a day early and we set up. If there’s any little thing, we have to get it just right so the employees have the best experience possible,” he said.
But somewhere between the planning and execution, everything took a turn, leading the $500,000 retreat to unravel. In a new interview with the WSJ published this week, employees of Plex, some of whom still work together years later, opened up on the trip.
Here are seven of the wildest experiences of the Plex team's trip to Honduras from the interview:
1. Eating Dead Tarantulas
Plex adopted a “Survivor” theme, which meant employees doing challenges most of them never saw coming. One of them involved eating dead tarantulas.
Shawn Eldridge, Plex’s head of business development and content, remembered the moment it stopped feeling like a game. “I knew there was a potential for it to be something pretty bad. When I opened up the cover, it was a dead tarantula,” he said.
“I’m a Texan, so I’ve been around tarantulas my whole life, I knew what it was. Never eaten one. My team was just like, ‘If you don’t want to do this, you are totally fine. We can take the loss.’ I just grabbed it and did it. Pretty horrible, not going to lie. Those hairs.”
2. Fire Ant Attack
Employees were forced to do military-style physical drills on a beach infested with fire ants."We’re doing Army crawling on the beach. It was 100 degrees," Greta Schlender, the senior product manager of Plex, said.
"Everyone is silent. We’re pretending we’re Navy SEALs. But I happened to land in the wrong spot. I’m just like, ‘Oh, my God, what is happening?’ I was sitting on a fire ant hill. I was wearing shorts, OK? I jumped up and I had hives and bumps from the bites. It was horrifying, and it was so, so itchy. The medical area didn’t have any regular antihistamine."
3. Porcupine Fell Through the Ceiling
One employee reported a porcupine falling through the ceiling of their hotel room, specifically into the shower. "One night while I was sleeping, I heard a crash in the room. I thought, Something must have fallen over, I’ll deal with it in the morning,” Rick Phillips, senior software engineer said.
“The next day I got up and went over to get in the shower and there was a porcupine. It must have climbed a tree and fallen through the ceiling.”
4. 30 Minutes Electricity at Night
Some employees said they only had electricity for 30 minutes at night."We had golf carts because the place was so spread out. The trees and the vegetation were beautiful but where I was they blocked the solar panels on the path. So the lights only worked for about 30 minutes at night,” Shawn Eldridge, Plex head of business development and content, said.
“The rest of the time it was completely dark. There were a few people, not me, who had some golf cart incidents.”
5. Stranded on the Island
With more than 100 employees attempting to depart via small planes, the flights were grounded, leaving the entire company stranded overnight on the island.
"We get word that, 'Actually, we're not going to be able to fly you back to the mainland tonight. At this point, my antihistamines have started to wear off. I'm starting to itch uncontrollably again,” Greta said.
6. Uncooked Food
Sean Hoff, an independent contractor who planned the trip, said the food was uncooked.
“They made 100 cupcakes with the wrong company logo. I told my staff, ‘Buffet-wise, make sure that you go out and you cut the chicken in half and you cut the beef in half,’ because it was coming out uncooked,” Hoff said
“The kitchen was trying to rush out food because they had never served 100-plus people in one go. I remember the steamed vegetables that came out one day—it was literally just boiled vegetables they flopped into a catering thing.”
7. Navy SEAL Training
To lead the Survivor-style drills, Plex hired a former Navy SEAL, a wrong choice for people who typically do desk work.
“One of our biggest mistakes was hiring a former Navy SEAL to pump the team up. As I’m in my room dying, I could hear them out there doing all their drills and yelling. So I’m in here thinking, This is terrible, but it sounds terrible out there, too,” Keith Valory, Plex CEO said.
David Adubiina
