A while ago work did this wonderful team building exercise. We all stopped work for the afternoon and were put into teams of three. RANDOM teams of three. Now, we’re a small company of about 20-25 people. At little over half those people are very very clever developer/sys-admin type people. Of which a lot of them intimidate me with their smartness, and it’s not often that I have to work with them. Well, the randomness insured that we were all kicked out of our little comfortable social crews and started interacting.

It was a lot of fun! We got a bunch of clues, none of which was listed in any kind of order. We got given the first clue, and the starting point and if we solved it correctly we could work out what the next clue would be.

So, the starting point was Embankment, and the first clue:

It makes no sense if unless you’re standing there. You go up the hill, till you come across Gordon’s Wine Bar where you’ll find a lane called ‘Watergate Walk’. So down you go, and eventually you’ll come across an old school gate that has Fi and Dei and Cvla (among other things) inscribed on it. There are a whole bunch of other letters and things, one of which is an ‘R’. The letter before it is an ‘N’, and so you use Clue N to get you to your next point.

However, there are also two other challenges that you have to complete on the way – The Photo Hunt Challenge + the Observation Questions. The photo hunt challenge meant you had check out your surroundings as you went and spot the landmark, image, or statue. There would be a question, like ‘Who is in the gutter here?’ with a photo of a mashed face. Looks like this:

I already knew that it happened to be Oscar Wilde, but there were 9 other questions that I had no idea about. Answering each question correctly was worth about 100 points, so I kept an eye out. We got about half, which was good.

The Observation Questions were easier. Like I said, I work with very very smart developers, and had two in my random group. So, while everyone else charged out of the office, we took a moment and googled a whole bunch of questions. London has these little blue plaques all over their buildings to tell the unsuspecting walker by that something interesting happened there, or someone important once lived there. Well, we could have kept an eye out, or we could have used google. We got 14/20, which was a pretty decent score.

Example Questions: What replaced Fishers Alley? What did Sheridan own from 1776? What did Charles Fowler design? (Goodwins Court, Drury Lane Theatre (aka the Theatre Royal) and the Covent Garden Market, the Conservatory, London Bridge + Sion House).

Well, the answers to all these questions were always a little bit off the beaten path which made them tricky to answer. Occasionally we found them, and altered the google answer a bit, but most of the time it was a bit of a guess. These answers (correctly answered) were also worth 100 points each.

Eventually the clues wound us all around London’s Covent Garden (past fun places like the Sherlock Holmes Pub, past the Savoy, through the Covent Garden Markets – all around the place, really!) and we all eventually ended up back at a Pub for dinner and drinks. It was a ridiculous amount of fun, a good way to get people who usually wouldn’t hang out socially to do so, and a fun way to see London. That last one was particularly good because a lot of us aren’t London locals, and haven’t been in London for very long.

Definitely one of the better Team Building days I’ve done. Have any of you got any decent Team Building stories?

Just another reason why working here is SO MUCH BETTER than the business end of the dirty fat cow that I used to work for (No love, ICONZ. Not even a little).

Yay for client appreciation :)

At the moment at work I’m designing a case management system. And the best part about mocking up the screens and working out the functionality is creating mock data:

I keep such brilliant, brilliant company :)

- Bob Hayes, on work.

Just another reason why working here is Teh Awesome.

Lately I’ve been trying to quit spending ridiculous amounts on lunch (oh lunch, how I love you so!) and so I’ve been bringing leftovers in, and heating them. At work, our microwave is on top of our fridge. On our fridge, there are many, many fridge magnets. Poetry fridge magnets. Kiwi slang specific poetry fridge magnets.

You can see where this is going. In the two minutes a day I spend in front of the microwave, I managed to create this:

Ahh fridge magnets. Indulging bad poets everywhere. :)

- Mabel Wharekawa-Burt.

Earlier this week there was Hikoi to protest the lack of Maori Seats in the new Super-City local government. There was some protest at work today, too. Why did Maori feel the need to do this? They aren’t special, there are a billion other cultures within Auckland now, do they all need special seats? What a waste of time, they said. We’re all New Zealanders now, they should be represented just like the rest of us.

I carefully ignored this kind of talk, not wanting to get into a debate out of my league. But I wish I hadn’t kept quiet. I wish I had spoken up.

The Hioki wasn’t just about the seats. It was about Maori being heard, and having a voice on the new council. It was about preserving the culture, and the history. It was about preserving the native culture unique to New Zealand, in modern society.

Oh, sure, Maori aren’t the only minority in New Zealand. Not even by a long shot. But we are the only ones native to New Zealand. No where else in the world will you hear the Maori Language spoken. No where else will you find the Maori history, or the culture. Sure, New Zealand is full of other cultures. But all those other cultures are native to somewhere else, another country, another island, another place. Those other cultures thrive both here, and in their native country. And all those other cultures haven’t fought in New Zealand like the Maori have. They haven’t been discriminated against in New Zealand like the Maori have. They haven’t had their New Zealand land taken away, or been punished for speaking their language in New Zealand like the Maori was. They haven’t had their culture turned over to the tourist trade, like in Rotorua. They haven’t fought like we have, and continue to do.

I’m not getting down on the other minorities. Many of them have fought their own battles, I’m sure. And we welcome them to New Zealand, and respect them and their culture in their own right. It is not a case of us or them. It is a case of preserving the culture unique, and native to New Zealand.

Liz messaged me, after reading about it on the news. She said she was proud to be Maori. Proud that we, as a people, were out there on the streets being heard. That we were fighting for the right to preserve, and live the Maori way in New Zealand, and fighting for fair representation on the new council. That we weren’t taking the removal of Maori Seats quietly. And I was proud too, to be a part of that movement. I was also proud that there were Non-Maori in the hikoi, supporting us, and our voice.

Still, I wish I had spoken up at work. Some debates are worth getting involved in. Even if you can’t explain it as eloquently as required. Sometimes it’s just the standing up that counts.

I was at the mall down from work the other day, and I saw this carpark:

Can they be any more ambiguous? Is it meant for all people? In which case, why did it need a symbol to tell us that? Is it for people who are either male or female (but not both), or perhaps people that ARE both, or perhaps people that aren’t sure if they are either? A confused trans-gendered person, or a transvestite? Do these people need special carparks now? Are we discriminating by carparks? Is this the evolution of sexism?

I worked myself up about it, I did. What could they possibly mean by that funny little symbol?Were they being horrible to people who didn’t deserve it?

In the end I hoped that it was someone being funny, a form of good-humoured street art. Hilarious carpark graffiti, designed to instigate confusion. Or that it was the local council or car parking company being idiotic again.

I still have no idea. It could mean anything, really. What do you think it means?

[edit]Other suggestions have been: emergency toilet parking, a muslim seperatist parking spot (because they can’t be seen together in public or something?), male driver, woman passenger. None of them make sense really, it’s so odd![/edit]

Sometimes I forget that some quirks don’t traverse from one workplace to another. The other day I got yelled at by my boss for being slightly sarcastic in an internal email. At ICONZ internal sarcasm was used as a one of those ‘touchstone’ moments in a ‘Yes, sometimes work can suck but we are all in it together’ kind of way.

Here this is apparently not the case. It was unsettling, and even through I disagreed with the justification that was used (forwarding emails vs a single well written contextual email) if ICONZ taught me nothing else, it was when it’s appropriate to keep my mouth shut and accept what’s coming my way.

After I was HORRIBLY unsettled. I found it difficult to concentrate and trying to push through was difficult. Okay so it was a small reminder to pull my head in and I should suck it. But I was all restless and the sucking it in part wasn’t going so well. In the end I went to lunch slightly early and drove around till I ended up here:

It was cold, and grey and windy and WONDERFUL!

I’m not the kind of person who can just let shit that comes my way roll off my shoulder. I’m not unaffected by what goes on around me, so it was nice to get away and stand in the freezing wind and to relax a bit.

And it wasn’t till I was standing on the sand watching the seagulls that I realised that the yelling I got was horribly severe for a single line of sarcasm, and that perhaps my boss was having a horrible day and I had just copped the end of it.

Standing on the beach made it easier to hope that his day was going better.