Piya's Perspective

This past Friday and Saturday were host to the annual training event for my company – Hawk-U – and they did a really good job with it this year.  Well, at least the first day – I’m a 3rd year freshman since the last of the classes and the graduation ceremony are always held on Saturday.

 

Goodies — They keep doing a better job with the company-branded goodies.  This year we received really nice red-and-black vests, messenger bags and travelers mugs.

 

Friday night event — The friday night team event for the past two years has been team karoke.  The first year, a lot of people moaned and groaned but it turned out pretty good.  Last year, people moaned and groaned because it had already been done.  So…this year, they kept it a secret.  Only 3-4 people knew what was going on and they did a great job in keeping it that way.  It turned out to be quite enjoyable.  Everybody was assigned a table for dinner and after dinner, pulled a scene from a hat and had 5 minutes to prepare a charade of that scene for everybody else to guess.  My team did “Clowns robbing a bank”. 

 

Classes — This year they decided to have all the required classes Friday and all the electives on Saturday, so my selection was limited. However, I liked what they offered.  They set up ‘Demo Alley’ where everybody could see what applications we’ve recently built.  They’ve brought in somebody to help guide us to the next step in software development.  And they brought in somebody from Dale Carnegie.

 

The Dale Carnegie class was as good as the people in the class, and I think the class and group I was in helped keep it entertaining and interesting.  The class was about enthusiasm — understanding what it means and finding ways to remain enthused in (and about) our jobs. One of the exercises we did was to write about our perfect work day. If it were currently a perfect world 6 months from now, what would our day look like…now that I have a little more time to put it together, I’ll think about it and post it later.

 

Town Hall meeting — this year, they included a Town Hall meeting where we could ask questions of the CEO.  The overall question was in respect to the extent Hawkeye would merge the 3 companies they hold.  Sounds like management is still trying to figure that one out.  Especially considering that the companies are working more and more closely with each other rather than just remaining separate entities who happen to be puchased by the same company.

 

People — it was really nice to start putting faces with names.  Our UK office has grown tremendously, and it sounds like I’ll be doing more and more work with some of them, so it was really neat to meet that team.  It was nice to see the guy who was backing me up while I was out on maternity leave (tho now he’s covering for another lady out on maternity leave).  I also realize that I really need to stop by our Maryland office next time Ari and I visit his family.

 

15 hours away from Simeon yesterday.  I callled around 4:30 or so just to check in and all was going quite well.  (Ari seems to think Daddy has to be on the other end of the line for Simeon to be crying.  Tonite, on our way home from a wine tasting party was the first time I had heard Simeon crying when I called.)  It does seem that Simeon is starting to drink more milk now.  Rather than needing 3 ounces per bottle, we may need to start providing 4 ounces.  I just hope I can continue to pump enough to keep him fed.