Another
guilty pleasure I have at work.
Q:What do
you do when you are waiting for a 5 minute build to complete?
A:Play a 20 minute game of foosball. Foosball
has quite a legacy at my work. To Celebrate the competing of a milestone
early in our 1.0 cycle our CTO got us a Foosball Table (A Tornado) for us
to play, when we first started playing almost all of us stunk, quite bad.
But after year(s) of practice we are much better. When
we first got the foosball table a new VP of Engineering had just started
working for us. He was from Massachutces so he wasn't quite the dot-com
type fun loving executive you would expect. (The grey hair kind of gave
it away). He hated the amount of time we spent playing foosball so much
to the point that after 1.0 shipped and we were starting on 2.0 that one
day he pulled in every regular foosballer he could into his office to have
a "talk." (I was working at home that day, probably dealing with the clowns
form Adelphia). This "talk" was a bit of beating around the bush asking
us not to play foosball durring work hours. Play on the foosball table that
one of the founders bought for us to play at work. And
the irony was that four of the people he got in had, just a few weeks earlier,
won the Chariman's Award for the work they had done for 1.0, while
playing foosball durring comapny hours. Needless to say that was
not a way to inspire morale amoung the masses. Productivuty dropped for
a bit too. That was yet another reason we all put on our "reasons
we hate (too strong) reasons we dislike
(too surgar coated) reasons we wish our VP would move back east" list.
There is some silver lining to this though. When the layoffs came
Mr. VP was the first to recieve a Pink Slip. Technically he complied with
a request by the board to submit his resignation (they let him keep his dignity).
So when we had a problem with one of the adjoining confrence rooms being
busy with sales meetings (the table was loud enought to cause problems in
that room) some of us decided to move the table. Of all of the places we
could choose we moved it into the old VPs office. The
good part is that now we are more productive. With the
table so much closer we don't waste as much time going there. |
