I was never so proud to work for Privasoft as I was this Fri afternoon.
If you've read my past blog entries, you probably guessed my company is a very supportive environment. We do Agile development. We have fantastic bunch of people. Our QA guys get along with our dev guys. We make a great product! But that's all technical. Fri pm I was happy to be a Privasoft employee for a more humane reason. What happened you ask? I'm glad you asked! HAHA
We had a scavenger hunt. Now this had been planned by NG for a few months now and she did a great job of keeping everyone in the dark (built up a heightened sense of adventure! LOL). So what you ask, right? The kicker was the ending!
This was just like most other scavenger hunts, find stuff, collect something, beat others. It's a fantastic team building event too! And at Christmas time, it's a great time to bond with people. Anyways, the last task was to end up at the Independent Grocers at Billings Bridge and collect an envelope. AAAAHHH MAN! "We've been running around aaaaaaaall afternoon, we're tired and it's about time to go home!" But then we open the envelope.
Inside is a letter instructing teams to buy from the given list, using the given gift certificates and proceed to the Ottawa Food Bank. HUH? What? DS, NU and I looked at each other and did a kind of double take. HUH? This things NOT JUST a scavenger hunt for fun now, this is turning into something much, Much, MUCH BIGGER than us, our team, or our company.
First thing on the list I was given was baby formula, then it hit me, this was for some baby on Christmas who's going to get this tin of baby formula and that's all he/she's going to get for Christmas. BANG! HHHMMM That's when this game took on a completely different meaning for people. And you could see it as everyone raced through the store looking for things on the list. You should have seen how everyone PERKED UP running around! Other customers must have figured out what was going on cause they were laughing with us! What was also very cool was I overheard someone (I think it was BC) say "screw the amounts, if we're over, we'll pay for it, don't worry about it!. I realized then, that team knew what this scavenger hunt was all about! It was about someone else, someone we didn't know, someone we would never know or meet, but it didn't matter, it was about spreading a bit of joy/help around in a fun way. Their enthusiasm was indeed contagious!
Here are some other touching things I realized later on that evening.
- Our president participated, no big deal eh? Except that he broke his back (among other major bodily damages) in the early spring time and he STILL participated! AND he NEVER complained once about his "past injury." Some pro sports people could learn from this guy IMHO.
- Our marketing person came up with the brilliant idea on her own and organized it all herself, that was a HUGE undertaking to organize everything! KUDOS NG, fantastic job!
- Our company had a very scaled back xmas party, nothing fancy, very respectful of the season and economic times, opting instead of spend the majority of the big Christmas party PIZZAZZ on the gift certificates at the grocery store! Very cool! VERY COOL!
- There seems to be a 2-1 ratio of Starbucks to Timmy's in the Ottawa downtown core! Weird!
- The pictures taken during the afternoon made for great conversation starters for shy people!
JUUUUUST as we were about to leave the Food Bank, we took one last pic. Pretty cool afternoon IMHO!
