In 2017, a streaming tech company called Plex decided to fly all 120 of its fully remote employees to Honduras for a week of bonding, team-building, and fun. They called it “Plexcon.” They spent half a million dollars on it. What they got was E. coli, raw chicken, fire ants, a porcupine crashing through a hotel ceiling, and about 20 workers literally stranded overnight on a remote island because the only plane that could get them home couldn’t fly in the dark.
This story — originally reported by The Wall Street Journal in 2025 — has since gone wildly viral, and honestly, it deserves every single click. It reads like a comedy script that nobody would greenlight because it’s too absurd. Except it actually happened. To real employees. At a real company. On a real island.
The Red Flags Started Before Anyone Even Got on a Plane
Before the Plex staff even left for Honduras, warning signs were flashing. Three weeks before the retreat, the hotel’s general manager resigned. His parting message to the retreat planners? “I wish you the best with your retreat.” That’s the kind of thing someone says when they know a building is about to collapse and they want no part of it.
Three days after the GM bounced, the head chef quit too. So the resort that was about to host 120 tech workers for a full week of meals had no one running the kitchen and no one running the hotel. A replacement chef was brought in — someone who had never cooked for more than a hundred people before. That detail becomes very relevant later.
Oh, and the road to the resort? Unpaved. Lined with armed guard towers. Men with machine guns. Just your standard corporate team-building vibe.
The CEO Got Taken Out on Day One
Plex CEO Keith Valory, 54, flew out a day early. He had a whole thing planned — he wanted to greet everyone as they stepped off the buses, channeling his inner Jeff Probst. He was going to be the host, the hype man, the leader welcoming his troops to paradise.
Instead, he ate a salad.
Employees had been warned not to eat the vegetables. The food safety situation at the resort was rough enough that the standing advice was: stick to fried food. But Valory figured he needed his greens. “Everything there is fried. Basically people are telling me, don’t eat the vegetables. I was like, I’ve got to have a salad,” he later told reporters. That salad gave him E. coli. On day one. He spent the morning his employees arrived flat on his back, completely out of commission. “I got E. coli, which is maybe the worst thing you could get, possibly, ever,” he said.
With the CEO down, co-founder and chief product officer Scott Olechowski, 52, had to step up and run the whole show. And the show was only getting started.
A Navy SEAL, Dead Tarantulas, and Fire Ants
The Survivor theme wasn’t just a name. Plex went all in. They hired an actual former Navy SEAL to lead team-building exercises. Military-style drills. In 100-degree heat. With near-total humidity. For a group of tech workers who — by their own leadership’s admission — were “not a super fit group in general.”
The SEAL, apparently, had never worked with a group so physically unprepared. Employees reported crawling across scorching sand, passing out during exercises, and struggling through drills that were clearly designed for people who occasionally go outside.
One of the early activities involved a forced eating challenge. Someone had to eat a dead tarantula. Shawn Eldridge, 55, Plex’s head of business development and content, volunteered. Whether that was bravery or desperation to get the challenge over with, the sources don’t say.
When the beach became unbearable, the SEAL moved the group to a nearby golf course for a guerrilla warfare simulation. That’s where things got worse for Greta Schlender, 41, a senior product manager. When the SEAL yelled to hit the ground, Schlender dropped — directly onto a fire ant hill. She was wearing shorts. Within minutes she was covered in bites and broke out in hives. The resort’s medical area didn’t have regular antihistamine pills. Their solution? They offered to inject it into her butt cheek. Welcome to Plexcon.
The Food Was a Disaster of Its Own
Remember the replacement chef who’d never cooked for 100-plus people? It showed. The chicken came out raw. The beef came out raw. The whole food situation was a slow-motion health code violation played out over a full week in the tropics.
This wasn’t a situation where the food was just mediocre resort buffet fare. It was actively dangerous. Multiple employees were warned off the salads and fresh vegetables — the same warning the CEO ignored to his immediate, E. coli-flavored regret. For a $500,000 retreat, the dining experience was closer to a gas station microwave than a catered corporate event.
And then there were the sand fleas. The beach — which was supposed to be the whole selling point of a Honduran coastal resort — had to be fumigated every single day to keep the sand flea infestations at bay. Every. Single. Day. Imagine paying $500K for a beach vacation where the beach itself is being sprayed with pesticides each morning before you can use it.
A Porcupine Fell Through Someone’s Ceiling
Yes, this is a real sentence about a real thing that happened. One employee reported that a porcupine fell through the ceiling of his hotel room. Not a gecko. Not a small spider. A porcupine. Through the ceiling. In his room. Where he was sleeping. At a resort his employer sent him to.
At a certain point during this story, you stop being shocked and start wondering what disaster is coming next. A porcupine through the ceiling of a hotel room in Honduras during a $500K corporate retreat barely even registers as the wildest thing that happened that week. That’s how bad this trip was.
20 Employees Got Stranded Overnight on a Remote Island
The most dramatic moment of the entire retreat came during what was supposed to be a fun day trip. Plex took over 100 employees to a nearby island. Getting them there and back required an eight-seat propeller plane making multiple runs. The problem? The island’s airstrip had no lighting system. That meant the plane couldn’t fly after dark.
Do the math. Over 100 people. An 8-seat plane. A limited number of daylight hours. Someone clearly didn’t run the numbers, because when the sun started going down, approximately 20 employees were still on the island with no way back.
They were stranded there overnight. On a remote island off the Honduran coast. Because their company’s retreat logistics failed at the most basic level of planning — counting how many trips an 8-seat plane needs to make to move 100 people, and how many hours of daylight are available to do it.
When the stranded employees finally made it back to the resort the next day, their coworkers gave them a standing ovation. Which is sweet, and also the absolute least you can do for people your company accidentally marooned.
The Legal Questions This Raises Are Serious
As funny as this story is in hindsight, it raises real questions about what companies owe their employees when they send them to remote international locations. Workers’ compensation experts have pointed out that injuries sustained during company-sponsored retreats — including ones held overseas — may be covered under workers’ comp policies, depending on state law and whether attendance was required or “strongly encouraged.”
There are also questions about employer duty of care: the responsibility to vet venues, ensure safety during physically demanding activities led by outside contractors, and make sure basic logistics like food, medical care, and transportation actually work. When you fly 120 people to a foreign country and hand them off to a Navy SEAL in 100-degree heat, you’re taking on a level of liability that should keep any HR department up at night.
The Weirdest Part: People Actually Liked It
Here’s the twist ending nobody expected. Despite the E. coli, the raw chicken, the fire ants, the porcupine, the sand fleas, and the overnight island stranding — a lot of Plex employees look back on this trip fondly. Greta Schlender, the woman who landed face-first on a fire ant mound and got an antihistamine shot in her butt, called it “one of the most fun trips ever.”
CEO Keith Valory reflected: “You get really close bonds on these trips.” And there’s actually data to support that — many employees who attended the 2017 Honduras retreat stayed at the company for years afterward.
Plex even kept doing retreats. A retreat planning company shows that Plex later held a “Plexcon” in Vietnam in 2025, complete with cooking classes, hackathons, and cable car adventures. Presumably, someone checked whether the chef had cooked for more than twelve people before.
The retreat organizer from the Honduras trip, identified only as Hoff, summed it up best: “It was just such a calamity.” And maybe that’s the whole lesson. Sometimes the worst trips make the best stories. Sometimes shared misery bonds people more than any team-building exercise could. And sometimes, when your boss says don’t eat the salad, you should really, really listen.
