Current mood:	exhausted
Current music:	No Cars Go - Arcade Fire
Entry tags:	vmware

Engineering team-building day
Yesterday the R&D dept. at VMware had a team-building day where we played a Survivor-inspired game before lunch and various team sports after lunch. The company chartered 3 buses to take people from the office to park across the bay and some people car-pooled. When we got there they randomly assigned us into large groups by handing out coloured bracelets along with breakfast. I was in the purple group.

After we'd eaten they split each group up on their own "island". The purple group was lined up in a row using a bucket-sort by birth-month and then divided up into 8 teams of roughly equal size. Each team was handed a flag and some face paint with instructions to choose a team-name and paint a team logo on our faces. We ended up being the purple people eaters and our logo was a purple pac-man with blood dripping out of his mouth. It was indicative of VMware's quick growth rate that more than half of my team had started after me. Our flag had 4 rows of little humanoid figures on it and would be used to keep score for the team by circling figures so that the team with the fewest figures circled at the end would be declared the winners.

We began with an immunity challenge in which 4 members of each team had to throw javelins at a skull in a large chalk circle. Teams were to be awarded 1 point for a javelin that landed at least partially in the circle and an additional point for knocking the skull over. After watching the 1st few teams all throw their javelins too high into the air and have them fall short of the circle, we threw ours directly at the circle and aimed for its far side. Our strategy yielded 3 spears inside the circle and succeeded in knocking the skull over. As none of the other teams had even managed to get more than a single spear into the circle, we won the immunity necklace handily.

The first round of challenges where we could have figures circled was this maze game where we had to flip tiles on a grid to discover a path through it within a given time-span of a few minutes. Each team member took a turn flipping tiles until they hit one that wasn't part of the path through the maze while the rest of the team face away from the maze. Then they would have to return to the rest of the team and another person would take their place. We devised a strategy that involved using a co-ordinatee system to specify tiles and decided that each time a person returned (s)he would tell the team which tile had been last found to be wrong. We also decided upon the statistically optimal sequence of tiles to try. Sadly, this strategy proved to be overly complex and broke down horribly. People kept thinking they had to try the tile that was mentioned and so we ended up overturning the same tiles multiple times in a colossal waste of time. Consequently, we ended up with 4 circled figures.

Although we failed to win the next immunity necklace, we were able to escape unscathed from the subsequent challenge. This one involved putting plastic fish into a bucket. The fish had hooks on them and were scattered around a disc-shaped mat. Across the mat lay a pair of ropes that criss-crossed each other with their ends sticking out on 4 equally spaced points along the circumference. Both ropes had been run through a metal loop that was positioned at their intersection and this loop was to be used for picking up the fish. We needed to get 10 fish into the bucket within 7 minutes to avoid getting any more figures circled. After we managed to pick the disc clean, getting 16 fish in 4 minutes, they made us stop. That revived our team spirits for the next few rounds.

The next immunity challenge involved predicting what our teammates would answer to given questions about VMware and each other. Each team was split into halves and handed a set of cards with questions on them. We had to answer the questions and if the answers for both halves of a team matched then they scored a point. One of the questions asked us to name the employee from whom a a quote was featured on the "about us" web page. Nearly every team guessed that it was Diane, the CEO; it's actually her husband Mendel, the chief scientist. We didn't win this necklace either but once again kept our noses clean on the challenge that followed.

This one was called "the acid river" and required each team to get across an imaginary river using blocks of wood and a pair of planks. We started out on one bank with 3 blocks and both planks while there was a 4th plank available on the far bank. Despite not really having a strategy, we ended up with what I think is the best solution: each plank held up by a pair of blocks at either end covering part of the distance and gaps at both ends plus between the planks. While it took us a while to get that setup, once it was ready we were all able to walk across quite easily. Some of the other teams ended up dropping planks into the ricer, thereby rendering them unusable, and having to make extremely difficult leaps between blocks that cost them several circled figures.

Although we didn't win the game, we came pretty close and it was a lot of fun. After a short reprieve for lunch, the organizers listed out various team sporting activities in which we could participate. It was pretty hot so I decided to go kayaking. Sadly, this hadn't been planned too well and the lake was closed so I opted to play whiffle-balll instead. The rules are very similar to softball but there are no strikes so batters just keep swinging until they make contact with the ball. During one of my at-bats, I was charging towards 1st base after a hit when the 1st baseman stepped backward into my base-line as I approached the base. Unable to stop in time, I crashed into him very hard, bounced of his ample paunch and ended up sprawled in the grass. A quick self-diagnostic indicated that I had not sustained any critical damage but I had to bend my glasses back into shape and my left quad still hurts.

When the whiffle-balll game wrapped up I decided to play bocce-ball next. It was a 2-on-2 game and one of the opposing players was ridiculously good, although he claimed to have never played before. Apparently he wasn't even sure what the game was called! That didn't stop him from wiping the floor with us repeatedly though. I wonder if he'll start playing more often now...

Update: the skin on my nose is peeling, indicating that I may have been sunburnt, although it doesn't hurt at all!