Last Friday Night: Getting to know you

Teri — Thu, 11 Feb 2016 13:06:34 +0000

Meet Martina, our Financial Controller

Her job title says it all: Martina is a busy person. She forms part of the demi-god administration team that keeps the agency running smoothly.
She spends her working hours handling paperwork on her 3 (yes, three) monitors, only popping up for air for sustenance around tea time to unveil her latest baking invention.
So she keeps us in check, and she bakes. As you can imagine, we love her dearly 🙂
Last Friday, it was Tina’s turn to bring something to the boardroom table. Looking for a much-needed break from numbers and figures, she decided it was time to unwind and get to know each other a little better, starting from our early years and leading straight up to the random stories one would tell around a campfire.

Part 1: Oh Baby

Everyone received an envelope with their name on it, which included the pieces to two puzzles: One is a baby photo of an unidentified colleague, the other is a hint to help you figure out who they are. For some, it was obvious (Debbie’s hint was a dancing couple and Roderick’s was a broadsword – no-brainer!)

The others took a little figuring out, but the stories behind each of the photos got the team-bonding going steady. The beer helped too.
Can you guess who’s who? Quite a few of us couldn’t make it that afternoon, so that’ll make things a little harder if you’re expecting a few familiar faces 😉

Part 2: Lucky Dip

Just when we thought things were getting intimate (I mean, three of the photos were bath-time treasures after all) Tina took it to the next level.
1 bowl, full of more folded strips of paper than you could count. Everyone grabs a handful of strips and has a few minutes to read through the questions he or she has picked up. Some were super personal, others has us laughing out loud.
We heard about fears and phobias (note to self: never plan a Switch event at a theme park). The guys shared fond memories of cartoon crushes (remember Fujiko?) We heard about mean taunts from teen years, life in other countries, someone’s history as a child model, first kisses and the superpower that Keith would go for if he had the choice.

There were sweet moments, sad moments and literal LOLs, all within the last hour of the week.
Nice one, Tina – that was definitely a team-bonding session.

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Last Friday Night: A Trip to Peru

Richard — Mon, 01 Feb 2016 14:29:35 +0000

Settling on a personal favourite for my Friday Night session was pretty hard. I am a man of many interests. Choosing one proved to be hard. I’d have gone for photography, but Ed had dibs on that and spoke about it the week before.
I realised that, even though I’ve been sharing photos from my Peru trip at random intervals on Facebook, I never actually went into the long and short of the entire trip with anyone – no one got a blow-by-blow account of what went on in those two weeks in South America.
So I spent some time going through my photos and, with a much smaller audience than the entire world, I accepted that it’s OK to show less-than-perfect photos if they’re only meant to illustrate a story over a short period of time.
For pretty obvious reasons I can’t go through the entire presentation in a bog post about it, and I can’t go into as much detail as I’d like to over here, but this is a small teaser of some of the highlights from the trip (and last Friday night).

Chilled

I stopped to ask this chips vendor in Lima if he minded me taking a photo. His reply was, loosely translated: “Yeah sure, but I’m not going to smile for the photo. I never do.”
Peru remains indelibly stuck in my mind for many reasons, but the fact that there were so many varieties of potatoes must be one of the strangest things I found. There were times when we had 3 or 4 different potatoes in the same dish. This guy was selling normal potato crisps (chips), sweet potato ones, and, quite naturally, popped corn.

Coffee

We visited farms where a good amount of the world’s coffee and chocolate is grown and processed. It’s quite an eye opener to see how far something we consume on a regular basis has to travel before getting to us. It’s also humbling to see the hard work that goes into it at source (and that we tend to take for granted since it magically appears on a supermarket shelf close to us.

The Mayor

This was the mayor of the community on one of the floating islands in Lake Titikaka, on the border between Peru and Bolivia. She keeps a hand-made rifle to protect her fellow villagers (around 10 of them) when their husbands are out fishing – sometimes for days on end.

Pisco Sours

This is a photo I took in a bar of our hotel in Lima. It’s one of the two or three bars that claim to have invented the Pisco Sour – a delicious cocktail I’ve only ever had in Lima.
I’ll be writing more about my trip over the coming months – hopefully at some point I’ll find the time to put everything together in a format that I’m happy with, but till then you’ll just have to follow my pictorial and anecdotal stories that pop up from time to time on my Facebook page.

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