Ok - wasn’t quite expecting the flood of work that was coming my way towards the end of the week, but I got tied up with a secret project that will be coming very soon - stay tuned for that - it’ll be free for everyone to join.

Anyhow I promised a post on the team building exercise that we played out after the ‘exciting’ bit of our merry conference. Kev’s been able to give you some of the low down already in an earlier post on what chaos ensued, but I feel the need to let you know a little more about what fun activities happened at our conference.

Well, after much laughter in the Generation Game part of the speaking, and a quite delicious packed lunch, we headed off to a water park somewhere in the Cotswolds for all sorts of boating shenanigans.

I found myself in team two - the oranges - (there were six teams in all) so shortly after arriving my face was entirely covered with orange makeup; I’m not altogether sure where it came from. It just so happened that most staff from the European offices were all grouped together in the oranges. While they all spoke excellent English, things maybe weren’t altogether on the same wavelength when we capsized our Canadian canoe three times in a minute. We were promptly told to get out of the water and never attempt to set sail again.

So, after firmly losing the first task of rowing, kayaking and Canadian canoeing (shudder) to the purples we went on to battle at some kind of Chinese long boat rowing - (that’s Dragon boating right? Yes, Wikipedia says so.) Well, we got firmly thrashed at that too, and I was relishing the prospect of getting the biggest wooden spoon known to man.

After that we had to endure several trips across the lake to collect stuff to build our raft. Luckily it was scorching hot, so being ridiculously poor at oarmanship (apparently that’s a real word) was compensated by building a pretty sweet tan. Once we’d collected all our stuff we had to build a raft in twenty minutes, but at least seventeen of those were spent by most of the team milling around. In the dying seconds we somehow built a raft that looked completely terrible in comparison to those built by the other five teams. For some reason, I nominated myself as one of the six crew members to row this beast across a small stretch of water and back again. I was pretty certain we were going to sink.

Despite my certainty, we actually didn’t do too bad in this task - I think we came fourth, even beating our old enemies team purple in the process, and we didn’t sink! So, unfortunately, I couldn’t get my hands on the coveted wooden spoon. Oh well… Now for what conferences are really about…

I could go on for hours about shenanigans of the BBQ and beers that commenced at about 8 PM, but I don’t think many people would be too happy about me posting the finer details on the Internet - that’s what Facebook is for! Normally in photographic form of course. Well, there was many a delicious cocktail consumed, plenty of tasty BBQd meat and even a few arcade games dotted around - as well as the chance to shake it up on Samba de Amigo. Probably the highlight was the limbo - which seemed to go on for several hours, and the surf board - here’s a slightly Photoshop enhanced photo of Martin doing his tricks:

Ghoulish hey? Maybe it’s just my drunken skewed vision…

Martin insists that I mention that he stayed on the surf board the longest out of all those who tried. The thing is, I got cocky by whooping and hollering, and the attendent turned the speed up because of this. I still hold that if I hadn’t been cocky then I would have won. Needless to say, I felt terrible in the morning.