Dave Barry has said that “Meetings are an addictive, highly self-indulgent activity that corporations and other large organizations habitually engage in only because they cannot masturbate”. While I wholeheartedly agree and advocate hiding in my red locker to avoid such activity, exceptions need to be made when partners visit to discuss important matters. At the end of last year we, as an organization, made a conscious decision to focus DevBridge into a pure consulting business. We learned the hard way that monitoring performance and goals becomes difficult when resources are diversified amongst consulting projects and our own startups. I must correct my course as I am deviating from the subject...
One of the highlights during Marius' and Gedas' stay was our company outing to the Chicago Indoor Racing in Addison. A return visit for many of our employees, the indoor track is great release for a group of testosterone charged developers that normally express their frustration by not commenting their code. Divided into two groups of seven, our colleagues and a sprinkling of their brave significant others duked it out in three qualifying races and a final showdown royal. Here is a brief summary, in elegant bullet points, to summarize the event:
- Tim is a bloody maniac that looked like Luigi hit by a shell in Mario Kart as he spun out twenty times during the race
- Ben, an avid rally fan, started out slow but finished second in the final race
- Andrew, a first timer to the sport, finished first but I'm going to attribute that to his sub 100 pound weight (I'm just jealous, Andrew, you were good, you!)
- The heavier members of the team need to hit the gym harder. I think I heard some of the karts squeal in pain ant terror when they saw their riders.
- We all looked terribly fashionable with the mandatory ski masks and I think they should be part of the DevBridge uniform
- Our group of developers hit some of the fastest lap times for the week (see picture)
- Gedas S. found it challenging to steer the kart as most of the time his arms were glued to the camera
So far my blog post has been lacking in nerdy-ness and I wish to correct that. Before Marius and Gedas headed out home we set up a LAN party in our office… that neither of them attended to due incomprehensible reasons. Around 8pm the main area of our office was lit only by sudden flashes of gunfire. A blend of military commands and consistent key clicks could be heard, interrupted only by the hissing crack of opening cans of Red Bull.
Decked out in surround sound headphones, micro-precise mice, and ultrahigh resolution monitors, the team and a couple of visitors continued to spill each others virtual blood until around midnight when a knock on the door announced the arrival of pizza. Sarpino's continues to provide us with high quality sustenance that makes your taste buds explode and your face sweat fat (say that quickly three times in a row). This, unfortunately, brings me to the conclusion of the evening. Suffice to say that we're not as crazy or young as we used to be and at 1am we were either sleepy, had babies and wives to take care of at home, or had headaches and twitches from one too many energy drinks.
We are all very happy that our friends were able to visit and stay with us for a couple of weeks and are already looking forward to their next trip.
