The first cut of the episode ran 37 minutes long and the producers were tasked with cutting the footage down to 22 minutes. Executive producer Greg Daniels considered making the episode a two-parter, one focusing on the Alliance and another focusing on Meredith's birthday party, but the appearance of party hats in the Alliance-only scenes caused him to nix this idea. Because the episode had to be cut down due to time, several scenes were drastically cut. The filming crew actually shot about 15–20 minutes of Steve Carell coming up with terrible card ideas, which was drastically reduced. During the party, Ryan talks to a different woman in the background of each scene. Although not much footage made it into the final episode, the producers thought this was a nice character touch for the new employee. The penultimate scenes of Michael telling several terrible jokes to Meredith were also trimmed down. The final scene where Roy confronts Jim was shot ten different times, each in a different style, ranging from Roy slamming Jim into the wall to Roy asking Jim, "Hey, what are you doing?" Although the crew felt that the wall-slamming version was more dramatic, they realized that it caused the episode to go from a comedy to an "angry drama."