Ping pong, exercise room provide fun at lottery HQ
Published 8:00 am Monday, April 10, 2017
- COURTESY OREGON LOTTERY - The ping pong table in the enclosed former smoking area at Oregon Lottery headquarters in Salem.
SALEM — The proof is in the ping pong: It really is fun and games at the Oregon Lottery.
With the advent of smoke-free workplace laws, the lottery’s enclosed smoking area was unutilized.
Until a state employee gamely stepped up.
“We had this space out there, so one of the employees donated a ping pong table and people play,” said Chuck Baumann, a spokesman for the Lottery.
In the past, the employee engagement committee organized ping pong tournaments, but it’s not clear how much the table is used now, Baumann said Friday.
The lottery’s former deputy director, Roland Iparraguirre, used to play, according to an investigation into his conduct reported by The Oregonian this week.
Other diversions at the lottery office? A workout room that includes an elliptical machine, treadmill and set of weights, as well as video lottery games in demo mode. The Oregon Lottery chooses which games to buy among those offered by its three video lottery suppliers.
Baumann said employees use the amenities on their breaks.
The ping pong table and other methods for staving off cubicle-induced ennui seem to be a selling point for the agency, which has more than 400 workers, according to a recruitment video on its website.
In that video, the Lottery bills itself as a “billion-dollar a year entertainment company” that has all the trappings of a Silicon Valley startup: generous benefits, a spirited workplace and a social benefit component (lottery proceeds go to fish and wildlife conservation, education and veterans’ services, among other things).
“Incidentally, because we are an entertainment company, sometimes we like to have a little bit of fun,” says the man in the promotional video.
While the lottery may not be the only state agency to have workplace diversions, it seems there’s no statewide inventory for such things.
Items like ping pong tables are typically acquired informally through donations. And they don’t require changes to existing state buildings, like moving walls, according to state Department of Administrative Services spokesman Matt Shelby.
