Workers forced to eat tarantula during nightmare corporate retreat

A corporate retreat hosted by a streaming company spiraled into chaos, as the CEO was sidelined by illness and a string of bizarre incidents unfolded, including one employee reportedly eating a dead tarantula.

Plex, a free streaming service, forked out $500,000 to take their employees to Honduras in 2017 for a company retreat that they still talk about to this day, employees told the Wall Street Journal this month. 

CEO Keith Valory, 54, is a big fan of the show Survivor and worked with Moniker Partners, a retreat agency, to plan a bonding retreat around the premise of the show. 

He was supposed to make a dramatic entrance like the show’s host, Jeff Probst, and reveal the week’s theme to employees, but Valory never got the chance after contracting E. coli from a salad at the resort, he told WSJ.

'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,"' he said. 

'I lost 8 or 10 pounds. They nailed an IV bag to the bedpost.'  

But his bathroom ordeal was no worse than what his 120 employees endured during the trip.

'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,' Valory told the outlet. 

During the opening ceremony of the retreat, Shawn Eldridge, 55, the current head of business development and content, had to eat a dead tarantula after opening up his team's platter to find the hairy spider. 

'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,' he recalled. 

'I’m a Texan, so I’ve been around tarantulas my whole life, I knew what it was. Never eaten one.' 

Later on, at dinner, the employees would be served undercooked food, as the resort had never fed a group that large and was trying to get meals out as fast as possible. 

'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,' Sean Hoff, 42, the founder of Moniker Partners, told the outlet.

Eldridge, however, said the 'food was awesome,' and the employees were 'razzing' the buffet. 

'At least this isn't a tarantula,' he said. 

Greta Schlender, 41, the company's senior product manager, objectively had the worst time on the trip, despite saying it was 'still one of the most fun trips ever.' 

Not only did she break out in hives after falling into a fire ant hill, but she had to get an antihistamine shot in her buttocks, got bitten by sand fleas, got trapped on Utila after dark during a company day trip, and had to get a second antihistamine administered through a vein in her head by a random woman after 'writhing' in pain. 

'We got back to rounds of applause from our colleagues for surviving,' she told the outlet. 

The group that got stuck after dark made the most of their evening on Utila, where they 'got matching tank tops' and saw reggae, Schlender said. 

Rick Phillips, 53, a senior software engineer, said he woke up one morning to find a porcupine in his bathroom after he heard a 'crash' the night before that he decided to ignore until morning. 

'It must have climbed a tree and fallen through the ceiling,' he added. 

Despite the fright, the hotel was able to get rid of the animal, and the incident gave Phillips some street cred with his coworkers. 

'I guess, for me, it was a good thing, because being a not-talkative software engineer, I got some notoriety,' he said. 

Despite everything going wrong, Valory, Eldridge, Hoff, Schlender, and co-founder Scott Olechowski, 52, still work for Plex nearly 10 years later. 

'There are probably hundreds of little inside jokes that came from that retreat,' Olechowski said. 

Valory agreed, saying: 'You get really close bonds on these trips. It’s like the life-sustaining force of the company.' 

'Still one of the most fun trips ever,' Schlender told the outlet.