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Fun stuff at the hackathon
Jun. 20th, 2019 09:37 pm1: my boss took her local direct reports plus her 2 remote workers who were in town for the hackathon out for a "team building" exercise. She took us to Escape Room Boston! There were 7 of us, and we escaped with 7 minutes to spare. 7 people was too many, because a few times we sat around while one person listened to a phone message or whatever to get a puzzle to then solve, which took 2 or 3 people, and there wasn't a lot of parallelism---you had to get clues from one puzzle in order to make progress. I think there was more than one "track" through, so there was a little parallelism, and inspecting the entire area for out-of-place items which were clearly a puzzle was faster with more people. It was fun anyway, but I'd guess 4 or 5 would have been better.
2: The entire hackathon was invited to participate in two team building exercises -- though neither of these had anything to do with a specific team, unlike the above, where my boss was trying to get us to know each other better, which can foster communication. In the first case, they sorted the entire participant list by first name, and split us into teams of 9. In the second case they sorted us by last name. I was waiting for the middle name sort...
2a: the first exercise was to make a poster that embodied our new slogan (which I think is kinna dumb, "Legacy Powers Legendary" -- "Legendary" isn't even a noun!) and our values of loving the customer. There were a couple of good posters that came out of it, and it was vaguely fun, and amusing to meet a bunch of people whose names started with J and K. Maybe the marketing department will use some inspiration from someone's poster.
2b: the second exercise was completely useless from a work standpoint, but it was fun (and by the end of Tuesday we were all pretty punchy and needed the break). We did an egg drop. The materials they gave us were inadequate to protect our eggs from the drop from the second floor of the parking structure, and most teams died on their first attempt, but a couple of teams survived to go again, this time from the THIRD floor of the parking structure. One actually succeeded! A good time was had by all and it was a really good thing it rained shortly after that to clean up the driveway!
2: The entire hackathon was invited to participate in two team building exercises -- though neither of these had anything to do with a specific team, unlike the above, where my boss was trying to get us to know each other better, which can foster communication. In the first case, they sorted the entire participant list by first name, and split us into teams of 9. In the second case they sorted us by last name. I was waiting for the middle name sort...
2a: the first exercise was to make a poster that embodied our new slogan (which I think is kinna dumb, "Legacy Powers Legendary" -- "Legendary" isn't even a noun!) and our values of loving the customer. There were a couple of good posters that came out of it, and it was vaguely fun, and amusing to meet a bunch of people whose names started with J and K. Maybe the marketing department will use some inspiration from someone's poster.
2b: the second exercise was completely useless from a work standpoint, but it was fun (and by the end of Tuesday we were all pretty punchy and needed the break). We did an egg drop. The materials they gave us were inadequate to protect our eggs from the drop from the second floor of the parking structure, and most teams died on their first attempt, but a couple of teams survived to go again, this time from the THIRD floor of the parking structure. One actually succeeded! A good time was had by all and it was a really good thing it rained shortly after that to clean up the driveway!
