So today my company had our annual personnel outing. Supposedly, this is useful for bonding purposes. We first had breakfast at the office during which Carel the global head of my division (that title is so cool. I hope someday I’ll be a ‘global head’ of something) gave a PowerPoint about plans for the future.Then we drove out to a nearby town to a huge, cold garage full of classic Citroens. We were assigned to teams of 4 to drive the Citroens to different locations indicated on a map. Teams were supposed to answer questions and complete challenges to gather points.
Unfortunately, the Citroens took a long time to get out the garage and my team’s car was at the way back. So we had to wait 40 minutes and by the time we were on the road we were freezing. (and the cars did not have heating.) We drove to the extremely lovely town of Oudewater and visited the 'Rope Museum.' There we had to complete a “challenge” of trying to make a complicated rope knot. Alas, there were former no boy scouts on my team so we did not do very well.
At this point, my Italian team mate Vito took the wheel of the Citroen and amused us immensely with his great enthusiasm. He honked the horn at every passer by and went through a roundabout three times very fast.
We drove to a dairy farm where we had to taste cheeses and guess what kind they were. We also each got a huge piece of the special cheese produced only by that dairy. Then we hit the road again and drove to a pub where we ordered drinks and had to try to win some more points by identifying the names of car-engine parts. Alas, there were no car-enthusiasts on my team so we did not do very well. We actually finished dead last in the overall competition. Oh well.
The competition- and the day as a whole- was very much skewed toward the male gender. I never stood a chance.
As we left the pub, heading into the cold and about to drive back, one of colleagues-not on my team- hurt her knee and required an ambulance. It took the event organizers about 20 minutes to figure out that only two people should stay with her and the other 30 of us should head home. I could barely feel my toes when we finally arrived back at the Citroen lot.
Once there, I heard Vito said he was heading back to Utrecht (in how own car). Immediately, three other (female) colleagues and I pounced. We had a very nice, warm ride home, laughing and talking about what we’d done for Sinterklaas last week. For me, that was probably the best team bonding moment of the day.
