Re: After all, it is Friday...

[Bill Swallow <techcommdood -at- gmail -dot- com>]

I've seen and used many tactics over the years.

One developer I worked with built a working periscope that he'd use
from time to time rather than prairie dogging in the cube farm.

At one point the entire docs department I worked in had all sorts of
Nerf guns and would have shootouts in the halls. We'd also blow off
steam by leaving for a long lunch once a month to play laser tag.

At another company we had an ad-hoc musicians' corner going at lunch
time on Fridays. Anyone was welcome to bring an instrument and play
along, usually to a basic blues riff to give everyone the ability to
play.

At another company, we had one of those stupid singing fish, though
this one was standing on a pedestal and was dressed like Elvis. We
used it throughout Engineering as a floating award given to those who
broke the main product build. The current owner would gather some
people, press the button, and march it down the hall to the offender's
office as it sung away. I was the first docs person to ever break the
build (I was doing some MSHelp2 integration work and removed what
should have been garbage files but for some reason they were still
referenced deep in the build scripts), and I had about 60 developers
and testers parade that fish down to my office, cheering all the way.
It was more of a rite of passage than anything else. :)

On Fri, Mar 12, 2010 at 9:51 AM, David Neeley <dbneeley -at- gmail -dot- com> wrote:
> I was thinking about some of the threads regarding various
> tension-inducing factors on the job, and I began to wonder what kinds
> of things you folks find useful for breaking the tension--or perhaps
> exposing a side of yourself that may be surprising to your colleagues.

-- 
Bill Swallow

Twitter: @techcommdood
Blog: http://techcommdood.com
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/techcommdood

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