Mark Rober walked into his own warehouse and immediately had no idea what he was looking at. Someone had rearranged the trash cans. The couch cushions looked wrong. And a cabinet that should have been empty was very, very not empty. That is the problem with running a company full of product designers: the people who engineer your monthly build boxes for a living are, it turns out, annoyingly good at hiding themselves. With nine of them loose inside the CrunchLabs facility and a 30-minute clock running, what looked like a casual game quickly became something closer to a professional operation.
The rules were simple and slightly brutal. Mark had half an hour to find all nine product designers. They were allowed to fight back using foam blasters. If he failed to find them all, they got to post whatever they wanted on his Instagram. The designers scattered into the warehouse armed with strategies ranging from cardboard box camouflage to custom-built false fronts bolted directly onto Mark’s own desk.
The hiding spots that almost worked
Evan went down first, shot first and caught first inside a cabinet, heading straight to what Mark called ‘product designer jail.’ Steven had built a false front onto the desk itself, a custom piece of engineering that would have been genuinely impressive if Steven had not also managed to get himself slightly stuck inside it. Mark heard the squeal before he saw the construction. ‘You made this custom?’ he asked, pulling it open. Steven confirmed it. ‘Now I see what I’m up against,’ Mark said, and moved on.
The infrared camera changed everything. Brought in as a secret weapon, it reads body heat as orange against a cool blue background, and it lit up the warehouse like a scoreboard. Danny, tucked inside what looked like a convincing disguise, showed up glowing. ‘Look how hot that is,’ Mark said, sweeping the lens across the hiding spot. ‘That’s like a lava.’ Danny came out. Mark pressed on.
A company messaging app caught another designer when Mark blasted a call to every internal phone simultaneously and simply followed the ringing through the walls until he found the source behind a panel fitted with a hinge. ‘Maybe next time,’ he told the designer, ‘you shouldn’t bring your work phone into your hiding spot.’
The two they almost kept
With one minute left and two designers still missing, Mark grabbed a set of car keys from a nearby desk and announced he would drive away with someone’s Subaru unless they revealed themselves. It worked on one of them. The clock ran out before he reached the second.
Adam was found under a couch after time expired, calm enough to report he could have stayed there ‘at least two or three more minutes.’ Caroline, the final designer, had been in plain sight the entire time. When her cover was finally pulled, the room erupted.
Mark lost by two. He posted on Instagram anyway, calling Lauren and Adam his two favorites by name, exactly as they had demanded. ‘I hate to lose,’ he admitted afterward, ‘but this is also nine of the most creative brains west of the Mississippi River, so I’m calling that a W.’
The false front still bolted to the desk
Steven’s custom false panel is still attached to the front of Mark’s desk, a fully engineered wooden frame that fits flush against the original furniture and holds one adult product designer at moderate comfort.
The warehouse has since been returned to working order, losers and winners cleaning up together, which is what the designers had promised from the start.
