Foosball propaganda

Several years ago, during the dot-com bubble, I worked for one at which a large staff of young employees sought new and different means of blowing off work. One of these was a massive 32-team teams-of-two foosball tourney, replete with a cash money pool. Management thought this was a good idea for morale, which was indeed high until the inevitable lay-offs. My buddy Luke (awesome offense, pictured below) and I (better than average defense) were a team, which he named C Players after reading an article that cracked us all up about problem employees who give just enough effort not to get fired.

At the same time I happened to be working on a project in which I was gathering educational links and editing some material on the history of propaganda. This led me to a lot of graphically striking but ideologically suspect propaganda posters, many of which I started downloading at home and altering for the hell of it, to teach myself how to use Photoshop and similar programs.

There was a lot of trash talk at the office during the tournament, and I thought it'd be a hoot to print color versions of mock-menacing C Players agit-prop, and post them at the coffee machine, in bathrooms and so forth. I recently came across a folder of these two and thought I'd share. Keep in mind that this was done on an older Apple machine several years ago recreationally, so there are a few rough patches. Unfortunately I think several of them have been lost in my upgrading of home computers.

Incidentally, we won the damn thing. We went up against a team that everyone picked to win in the final, that had played a lot of foosball in college and were destroying everyone, and came back from a goal from elimination and a two-game deficit in a best of five series to win. The funniest bit was that many people at the office didn't like one of the players on the dominant team very much, and a frankly mean-spirited howl of rejoice went up from most of the staff when Luke scored the series-winner, sending said employee stomping out of the room cursing us all. We also won, I believe, $128. Ah, office jobs...