Mike Judge says Office Space helped rid the world of “flair”

By Sean O'Neal | June 17, 2014 | 5:34pm

Aux Features Film

Mike Judge’s Office Space has already given the world so many gifts: That ultimate personification of the corporate banality of evil, Bill Lumbergh. A renewed celebration of Michael Bolton’s entire catalog. The fax machine, now effectively hunted into extinction. But according to Judge, it may have affected one of our culture’s other most pervasive enemies—the pieces of button “flair” once worn by servers at T.G.I. Fridays.

“About four years after Office Space came out, T.G.I. Fridays got rid of all that (button) flair, because people would come in and make cracks about it,” Judge recently told Deadline. “One of my ADs asked once at the restaurant why their flair was missing and they said they removed it because of that movie Office Space. So, maybe I made the world a better place.” Indeed, now a chastened, more mature T.G.I Fridays no longer forces its waiters to talk about their flair, instead allowing them—and their grateful patrons—a side order of dignity* to go with their bacon mac ‘n’ cheese bites.

*T.G.I. Fridays’ Dignity Stackers come basted in our signature, hickory-smoked Jack Daniels sauce.

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