kahunaburger

I never win anything. Lottery tickets are always blanks and all contests I participate in are usually won by others.

It’s quite common for my employer to organize some “fun” activity after a certain milestone in the development process has been reached. We declared “Beta” for the application I’m working on. That happened last week and yesterday we had said team event. Working remote most of the time, I’m usually excluded from those activities, because people in the Bay Area will just take a day off and drive somewhere in the neighborhood. It was different this time: we have a number of people, like me, working remotely and management felt they should not be excluded. The task was to decorate our “offices” in a way that was related to our project. Each team member (local or remote) got a gift card for a Target store and was allowed to spend some money on decorational material. Afterwards we were supposed to decorate the office and take a digital photo of the final result. That photo was uploaded to a Wiki-site in San Jose and after all photos came in we were supposed to vote for the most creative, funniest, most original one. The first prize was a brand-spanking new 8GB iPhone.

I won Now I need to find out how to make that iPhone work with T-Mobile …

Oh, and here’s the winning entry:

Yes, I decorated Pia’s bathroom as my office: there’s a rice-cooker in the corner, an emergency supply of wine, a pillow/blanket in the tub (including stuffed animal), important info posted on the walls, crackers on the tank and, most importantly, a foam-padding on the toilet seat. Now people know why I never use the webcam when participating in conferences …