IT people loose in the kitchen

I work for a company called SnowyHydro which supplies Hydro Electricity from its power stations in the Snowy Mountains. I work in the Sydney office which is involved in Trading Electricity on the National Energy Market. I write applications for the traders to help them trade efficiently in the market. Our head office is in Cooma and so most of the IT team I work with are based there. Every year we have a get-together for a little bit of team building. We usually have someone come in and talk to us on one topic or another and then there are some team building games followed by dinner.

Last year the games were bongo drumming and acting out little plays which was good, if you’re into that kind of thing. This year was right up my alley. We never know what's going to happen until the day. There’s nothing like that element of surprise to give you that nervous feeling all day. But there was nothing to be nervous about this year because after a few hours of discussions on Customer Service we were all presented with aprons and told to head into the kitchen of the Lodge we were at.

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We would be having dinner at the Lodge that night and our task was to split into three groups of fifteen and make the desserts for the night. Each group had an allocated dessert to make. Ours was Pavlova and there was also lemon tart and a buttermilk pudding.

All of these people crammed into the kitchen were a sight to behold, let alone when they all started chopping, whisking and baking. It was great fun and very interesting to see all these IT geeks hard at work making dessert. Some of these grown men couldn’t refrain from boyhood times in the kitchen of flicking food and adding unnecessary ingredients and general mayhem but I think, it would be safe to say, everyone enjoyed themselves. Even the people who weren’t really into the cooking had fun supervising and watching everyone else at work. And the best bit was we got to enjoy the fruits of out labour at the end of the day. There was great competition between the three groups but, of course, the Pavlova was the outright winner with the crowd.

With group bonding like this you can definitely count me in.