This Friday, the office took a vacation from the usual routine for our annual offsite. This year, the organizers picked Huizhou, a nice “small” town about an hour and a half drive from Shenzhen. The offsite consisted of team-building activities, some strictly fun stuff, and meetings. Of course, Greg’s farewell party was the centerpiece.

Here’s a shot of the area that we were playing around in. Quite lovely, eh?

One of the activities I was looking forward to was the laser tag game, having played lots of that in college back in C’lumbus. Well, this time was quite disappointing. The folks who were running the game spent about an hour explaining the rules. The even presented inane rules like “Don’t go hitting each other” and “You’re not allowed to cover your sensor.” Jeez, really? Come on! Just reset the counters, and let us go.

The weather was questionable all day long and after thirty minutes to suit up, test the gear about 5 times, we finally set off. And where did we go? The parking lot! Well, a lot good my sniper rifle is going to do. The other group had a decent starting point on high ground and in a lot of woods. Not surprisingly, I didn’t last long. The game ended about 15 minutes later, then it started pouring. Baah!

As soon as we got off the bus, it started raining. We spent the next half an hour or so getting ready to play. Then it started raining about 15 minutes later:

“Don’t stick your finger in the barrel of your opponent’s gun.”

Well, the laser tag was the most lame part of the entire offsite. We had an awesome dinner at our 5-star hotel then went to Greg’s party. Now, the party was the best I’d been to yet and a huge success. However, it was almost disastrous. I was to show my farewell movie to Greg, but, sure enough, there were technical difficulties trying to set it up. First of all, the DVD was burned on to crappy media and wasn’t playing successfully. Not to worry, I brought my own laptop as a backup. So, I gave that to the folks in charge of the movie. A few minutes later, after expecting to see the movie playing on the big screen, I returned to see the hotel workers twisting copper wire together on the audio cable!! What the heck!?!? I nearly blew a gasket. People were already showing up at the party. Even Greg was there. On top of that, still no video. We were shuffling laptops in and out, media was failing, the hotel worker kept twisting the audio cables. I was going to be disappointed and angry if the movie didn’t play. In fact, I would have called the party a failure. Some people were wanting to give in, but I demanded, “There’s no way we’re not leaving here without getting this movie to work”, I said.

No video still, I tried one last thing and brought the video down to the lowest resolution. It worked! One of my colleagues said, “Oh, it’s still not that clear, let me adjust the video driver.” “Are you insane?!?!”, I was thinking. I didn’t let him touch it. And miracle upon miracle, the audio finally kicked in. At the end of the evening, we showed the movie. A tremendous success! Enjoy:

Superstar Greg

Photos of the festivities to follow…