Senior executives at the tech company Plex were eager to treat their 120 fully remote staffers to a weeklong corporate getaway in a tropical paradise.
The plan for the Honduras trip was simple: Company meetings and team building by powdery soft beaches during the day and island fun at night, at a cost of roughly $500,000 to the company. They’d build the trip around a “Survivor” theme, with teams and challenges. But it’d be fun, not too physically grueling. The CEO of Plex, a free streaming platform, would play a role similar to that of “Survivor” host Jeff Probst.
Perhaps the executives should have taken it as a sign that just as the first bus of staffers pulled up to the resort, the chief executive was already in his hotel bathroom experiencing the initial waves of a violent stomach infection. What followed was a comedy of errors including military drills that outpaced anything this group of office workers had in mind, a rogue porcupine, stranded airplanes and one syringe to the butt of an employee.
Corporate retreats are generally assumed to be torture, or at least a semi-stressful chore, what with their forced-fun activities and hybrid work-play environments that leave workers confused about boundaries. It’s no wonder the new season of “Jury Duty,” a comedy series that tricks an unsuspecting non-actor into believing his off-the-wall fictional circumstances are actually happening, is set at a corporate off-site.
But in real life, Plexcon 2017 beats anything on TV. Here’s the story of an all-staff company getaway told by six people who were there, a trip where most everything that could go wrong, did go wrong. Nearly a decade later, they’re still working together—and still talking about it.
Sean Hoff, 42, founder of Moniker Partners, an independent corporate retreat agency that planned the trip: About three weeks before we arrived in Honduras, we got an email from the hotel’s general manager that said, “I will be departing. I wish you the best with your retreat.” I knew something was off. Three days later, another email: The head chef was no longer going to be at the hotel.
Scott Olechowski, 52, chief product officer and Plex co-founder: We get there. We’ve got to take a bus from the airport. Dirt roads. You start getting closer and there are guard towers around the property. People with machine guns and stuff. A lot of people were like, “Where are we going?”
Keith Valory, 54, Plex CEO: 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.
Scott: Keith woke up the day that people are coming in, Sunday morning, and he is sick as a dog.
Keith: Everything there is fried. Basically people are telling me, “Don’t eat the vegetables. Don’t eat the vegetables.” I was like, “I’ve got to have a salad. Just one little salad.” So I got E. coli, which is maybe the worst thing you could get, possibly, ever. Just as people were arriving on the buses I was like, “Uh oh.” I lost 8 or 10 pounds. They had a doctor come to me, which apparently is pretty standard. They nailed an IV bag to the bedpost.
Scott: People are arriving for a party that night. The next day is the “Survivor” theme kickoff. There is not a person on the planet more excited about “Survivor” than Keith and his wife. They have watched every single episode.
Keith: My wife and I met Jeff Probst. What I wanted is when everybody shows up, I do a Jeff Probst, “Welcome to the island. Here’s the theme for the week.” But Scott got to do it.
Scott: The opening “Survivor” thing was a contest where people on their different teams open up a platter. You have to eat what’s on the platter.
Shawn Eldridge, 55, Plex head of business development and content: You got something good, then not so good. It was escalating. I knew there was a potential for it to be something pretty bad. When I opened up the cover, it was a dead tarantula. 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.
“This is not a super fit group in general.”
Keith: 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.
Greta Schlender, 41, senior product manager: We’re doing Army crawling on the beach. It was 100 degrees.
Shawn: I bailed out partway through. I went into the ocean just to cool off. I went in probably on all fours just because I was tired.
Scott: This is not a super fit group in general. The ex-Navy SEAL is like, “We can tone it down, no problem.” We get up there and it’s hot and humid and people are passing out. I don’t think he’d ever seen quite such an unfit group. We ended on I guess what’s probably a golf course.
Greta: On command, everyone had to hit the grass. 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. So they’re like, “Oh, we can shoot some into your butt cheek.” That was a first for me.
Scott: Someone saw an alligator on the golf course.
Sean: To surprise us, 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. 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.
Shawn: The food actually was awesome. We were razzing, “At least this isn’t a tarantula.”
“There was a porcupine. It must have fallen through the ceiling.”
Sean: People’s showers, water and electricity kept going off during the day. We were running around delivering water bottles to the rooms. There was a heat wave that week, so I was constantly sweating. I was trying to put out fires all day. I wasn’t hydrating, and so each afternoon I would start having these heart palpitations. They had to call an ambulance and hook me up to an ECG machine. They were like, “Sir, you need to slow down. You are stressing your body to the maximum.”
Shawn: 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. The rest of the time it was completely dark. There were a few people, not me, who had some golf cart incidents.
Rick Phillips, 53, senior software engineer: 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. 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. It was acting pretty calm. I called the front desk. I said, “There’s some sort of large rodent thing here.”
Scott: I think it might have been a Mexican hairy dwarf porcupine. They are native to Honduras.
Rick: The hotel pretty much just got the porcupine and left. I guess for me it was a good thing, because being a not-talkative software engineer, I got some notoriety.
Greta: It’s a beautiful resort. There are sand fleas. They had to fumigate every day.
Scott: We did a nice dinner down by the beach, and everyone got bit by the sand fleas that weren’t supposed to be there.
“We all got matching tank tops.”
Scott: We took a bunch of planes to an island called Utila. The people there are huge fans of American baseball. A hurricane destroyed their baseball field and we donated money to restore the field. Keith threw out the first pitch.
Greta: It was a really nice day. We’re all in the water, hanging out, having beers, and then they’re like, “OK, we got to start heading back.”
Sean: The island has a very small airport. We were running this airlift, like small propeller planes with eight seats, trying to get more than 100 people back to the mainland before twilight hits because they don’t have lighting on the runway. I’m standing on the runway, “OK, let’s go! Next plane! Next plane!”
Greta: One of my colleagues, who is now one of my best friends, she and I were like, “We’ll be the last ones on the planes. We don’t mind.”
Sean: We didn’t make it. Two planes didn’t take off.
Greta: We get news 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. They’re looking for a doctor on this island to hook me up with another shot. I am writhing. This woman in a hot-pink shirt, she’s like, “I have the antihistamine.” She put a line into a vein on the top of my hand so that she could administer it. I’m like, “I hope she’s a doctor.”
Sean: I just said, “Guys, there’s nothing we can do. Let’s just make the most of it.” We found some beach hotel and drank beers all night.
Greta: We all got matching tank tops. We went and saw reggae. They flew us off the island at 6 a.m. We got back to rounds of applause from our colleagues for surviving.
Scott: There are probably hundreds of little inside jokes that came from that retreat.
Keith: You get really close bonds on these trips. It’s like the life-sustaining force of the company.
Sean: It was just such a calamity.
Greta: But still one of the most fun trips ever.
These interviews have been edited and condensed for clarity.
Write to Ellen Gamerman at ellen.gamerman@wsj.com