Cleaning Up

I love my job.

So, last Friday was Clean-Up Day. We have this event every June. We spend the morning cleaning our offices, we have an outdoor lunch and then the afternoon is usually full of fun. For instance, for my first couple of years, the afternoon was filled with an Olympics where departmental teams would compete in games like Scattergories and Pictionary and Bocce Ball.

Two years ago, my friend Emily took over and breathed new life into the day with an amazing variety/talent show (where I embarrassed myself in front of everyone with improv comedy).

Last year, we were told that Clean-up Day "is about cleaning up." And so, that's what happened. The fun was drained out of it. We worked, ate lunch, went back to work, and then about a quarter of the company came back outside for a lawn concert with Warren Barfield.

This year, our events committee chose to blow the roof off. We held an interdepartmental Heptathlon. In addition to events in Pictionary, Cornhole (or Bags), a Golf Challenge game, Croquet and Bocce, we also rented these big blow-up games from a local party rental place. We got a 52-foot obstacle course and the day's big fave, the Velcro Wall.

Here's the obstacle course:

Because I was on the committee and had to judge games, I didn't really get to compete for my Media Group's team. (We're the consumer group. And so, we named the team: The Consumering Fire.)

For me, the best part of the day was "testing" the inflatables before anyone else came outside. Clay, Phil and I ran the obstacle course. Clay, Kim, Emily and I goofed around on the Velcro Wall.

Here's Clay:
Emily:

Me:


The Consumering Fire ended up winning Third Place in the games that day, mainly because of David. David, who does marketing for our magazine and runs our MySpace page, participated in every event several times and racked up mega-points. Here he is scoring a 9 in the Velcro leap:

The only competing I did was in the Velcro Wall. But I didn't really do that well. I got a high score of a 6. No upside-down stuff for me. (However, The Consumering Fire did go on to WIN the Velcro Wall event. Thank you, David!)

Most of my day was judging the Bags games:

While this wasn't quite the high energy entertainment of the inflatable games, I did have fun running Bags. Actually, I was surprised how many people wanted to play the game. We had a line 4-teams deep at one point!

That goes to show how good the day went over. This was a much-needed morale boost to the company. There's such a tangible shift in attitude and spirit change around here it seems. There was so much laughter. Almost everyone stayed outside to either participate in or watch the games. In fact, there were dozens of chairs set up around the Velcro Jump.

And who can blame them. Watching co-workers stuck on flypaper is pretty funny: