Tuesday, March 29, 2011

“And I don't know how, to slow it down… My mind's racing from chasing pirates.”
Beautiful melody by Norah Jones was playing in the background… But suddenly i woke up, only to realize that it’s my phone that was ringing. “Hello”… “Hey, hope you are reaching office by 8:15 AM” It was the HR manager on the other side. Today was our much awaited Team Outing day for the trip to Manesar. “Gosh, its 7:30 AM.. I’m late!” I quickly got ready and reached office just in time. It was a beautiful morning to have a team outing and soon our convoy started revving up towards Best Western (BW) Resort, Manesar..

Soon we reached our destination - Best Western Country Club Resort. It was quite refreshing to see the sprawling 50 acres BW resort equipped with modern amenities and various indoor-outdoor leisure activities designed to suit all. We were welcomed by a team of external facilitators who had been actively preparing for our team building events planned for the day.

The action began right after breakfast as one of the external facilitators used an innovative way to group us into four teams. He gave us each a slip of paper with a name of an animal mentioned on it. We were asked to find our fellow team members…without talking, and were only allowed to make the sound of the animal mentioned on our slip! Sounds simple, right? Well, it wasn’t… as at the same time the ducks were quacking, the dogs were barking, the cats were meowing, and we the hens were clucking! So Hens were Hancocks, Dogs were Plutos, Ducks were Donalds and Cats were Tom! This interesting team grouping got us all to start anticipating more fun events unfolding through the day.



Well, we didn’t have to anticipate for long as the team outing facilitators were ready with the first game to get us going. Each team was asked to walk together on Skis and do a round. An ultimate team building challenge they said, and we made the mistake of laughingly taking it easy. No wonder, we the Hancocks lost and Donalds & Plutos won but not before we gave all of us a good dose of entertainment with our hilarious bloopers during the round :)



The next game in row was 'Huff and Puff'. The team to move the cup strung on a thread from one end to another in the shortest time by blowing air into it would win. Raring to make up for the last defeat, we huff-ed, we puff-ed and won the task! PHEW… I was almost out of breath after this one.




Now it was time for Marbleo. Team members were supposed to pass a marble through bamboo tubes to each other and with no retakes allowed! And the marble seemed adamant. Adamant to not let us have it easy in this one! It rolled and fell... we started again and it dropped again… We tried again but it fell again… and again... and again… “Grrrrrrrr”, I mumbled... but still we were hanging on… just then, we heard a loud cheer! Apparently, Team Donald and Tom had shown inspiring skills and won it straight! We lost!




The most amusing balloon fight followed next. Balloons were tied to our feet and each team stomped over other's feet to burst them while saving their own balloons. And then, for next 10 mins, everyone was jumping, running, stomping sometimes on one leg then on the other. Hancock Abhishek was proving too good for the rest, “C’mon … Bravo…” we shouted and he survived this madness in what became a game of cat and mouse with Pavitar towards the end.


By lunch time, the score line showed us leading the group with a good margin and Donald and Pluto going neck to neck and Tom was also not far behind.
We enjoyed the sumptuous lunch and got our batteries charged to get going again.

Our ‘Creativity Quotient’ was challenged next for the last activity of the day. We were presented with scrap kept on the table and a task to innovate & create something unique and meaningful out of it. There were cloth, pins, net, straws, cardboard, paper cups, plastic bottles and much more but what was less was the 30 mins time to complete this task! With the start of the timer, everybody started fidgeting with the items kept on their tables to create something different & unique. Tom created a ship, Donald created a windmill to purify water, thinking about 2050- Pluto created a water city and we (Hancock) cracked the secret of “How does God manufacture humans?”




We all had a confident look as if we were always sure we could pull off something unique and meaningful out of anything. And I thought why not, after all that's what we do as iXiGems day in and day out! :)

“Hancocks are the winners”, out came the announcement and we happily took the title of ‘The creative team’ with our most innovative concept of creating a customized human being. Isn’t the concept great? Just imagine, if you could have the option to create a human being with your choice of hair, eye, color, looks, characters or anything that you can think of.

With a couple of hours left for our leisure, we played some cricket and then Dumb Charades. Needless to say, it’s always fun to play Dumb C, some ingenious mime for not only the difficult ones but also for the simple movie titles….and many expected and unexpected laughs!!

After sunset, we started winding up and left the resort. Discussing smiles and stories of the day we were on our way back and reached Gurgaon.

"Today was so refreshing", one said and "Let's plan our next team's day out soon" said another...With such resounding rejuvenation we parted for the day...only to come back on Monday with more energy and better team play to do what we do best together – Keep bringing to all iXiGOers an even better travel search experience!

Cheers :)

P.S.: Thank God, the next day was a Saturday to get better of the body aches from jumping & running after a long time! :)

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