« The Phenom | Main | Goin' to the PDC »
August 17, 2005
Ping-Pong
When the Monad team moved to building 44 last fall, we discovered that there was a ping-pong table in a common area on the 2nd floor (it's in the "breezeway" between the two halfs of the building, for anyone who knows what that means). There was also a pool table on the third floor, which never got much use; but the ping-pong table caught on. Now it tends to be occupied at all hours of the day. Walking to the bathroom you may spy an orange ping-pong ball bounce into the hall in front of you, followed quickly by a sweaty Monad tester bent on retrieving it. A quick search of any office is likely to reveal a ping-pong paddle hidden among the .Net manuals and empty soda cans.
To have some fun and build team morale, my boss had the idea of holding a ping-pong tournament for AXP (AXP is the product group consisting of the MMC and Monad teams). He tasked himself with organizing the tournament, but wasn't quite getting around to doing it. We have a PM intern on our team this summer and I 85%-jokingly suggested one day that we assign the intern the task of organizing it. My boss immediately left my office, evil gleam in eye, and 30 seconds later came back to announce that the deed was done.
Once the project had a committed owner it got off the ground, complete with fancy double-elimination chart posted on the window. I got bounced out after two games (comment from one of my opponents: "You were easy to beat once I figured out you couldn't hit a forehand"), but the tournament is still going on, with the final sometime next week. We also took the important step of ensuring the event would be forever commemorated in Microsoft history, namely, we ordered t-shirts for all participants (I've commented in the past that the Monad project has been somewhat lacking in t-shirts).
Posted by AdamBa at August 17, 2005 01:31 PM
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://proudlyserving.com/cgi-bin/mt-tb.cgi/295
Comments
Now I see where did that brilliant idea came from !!!
Posted by: Hemant Mahawar at September 7, 2005 11:25 PM
