Team Buildin' Exercise Ninety Nine!

Can't you just hear Jemaine and Bret when you read this title? Hehe. Anyway, it's not 1999, and I didn't get a cool t-shirt, (what a rip off because we all know how handy those are come business time...) but last Tuesday I had my own Team Buildin' Exercise. Only, around here, they called it the "Jardine Schindler Talents Conference." I like "team buildin' exercise" a lot more, it's a lot more lyrical and funny.

Oh, before I get into that, I need to make two points. First, many of you will notice this is being posted at a time that is neither on the weekend, nor after work. That's right, the Code-man got to stay home again today because of a Typhoon. These things rock! Only problem is, the Typhoon is going to ruin our weekend. We had big plans and they all involved being outdoors, now we may be holed up in our room all weekend. Lame... but at least I don't have to go to work and try to find things to keep myself busy like doing "competitor research" (i.e. surf the net), "market research" (i.e. reading the newspaper) or just plain looking out the window at the harbor. I still don't have an offical code-name for that one yet, but it will come.

Now to my second point, as many of you just discovered from Nicole's last post, I have a freaking awesome wife. I always knew this, and yes I am VERY appreciative of all the stuff she puts up with. She really is rad.

All the new "talents" in Jardine Schindler flew into Hong Kong last week for some training and leadership building exercises. On Tuesday, they chartered a boat for us and we went out to Tung Lung Island, one of the Outlying Islands. This one lies at the mouth of the harbor, and there is only one little old lady that is left on the island. I wonder what she is doing today? She lives in a little shack made of wood and metal siding... hmmm....

(Nicole laughed when she saw this picture, all she could say was "Look how white you are hon. HAHAHAHA!!!" Thanks....Thanks...)

Anyway, the day was filled with your standard scout camp or youth conference activities, only instead of spiritual metaphors, it was all leadership/management metaphors. (Think "if the boat was sinking who would we save? Accounting, sales.... the receptionist?") It was a lot of your basic stuff, the only difference was none of these people had ever done or seen anything like this before. Zip-line, rappel/abseiling, rock climbing, make an airplane out of popsickle sticks and plastic wrap... It was pretty fun.

I do want to mention the zip line though. Like I said, no one had ever done anything like this before, and the company Schindler hired to put this on for us knew it. So instead of just a zip line down a hill, they set the line up between two cliffs over the water. (See below)

Pretty cool huh? The only thing is, this is exactly how everybody looked when they went. Cody thought that was kinda lame, so Cody decided to show his Asian buddies how it's really done:

A little bit more exciting, eh? Yeah, they all thought I was crazy and a few of them are still amazed I didn't die. It was fun but the line was kinda short, and you really couldn't get going very fast because they set it up between two sheer rock walls. If you got going too fast, you would slam into the other wall, and well, that may tickle a bit.

Anyway, here is a picture of us at the end of the day. Bet you can't tell which one I am?

(Well, I posted this much earlier today, then I decided that there needed to be more pictures. It was such a cool place that I should probably share it with everyone. So here are a few more pictures of the island)

Yes, thats the airplane designed and built by me in 20 min taking a nose-dive.... Guess who won? Thats right, the kid with the Aerospace Engineering degree.... cheater.