The entire Aviva Solutions team has been away for a few days, from the 7th till the 9th of September, to celebrate its first year anniversary. Usually a company will pick up the beamer and go to some standard venue to show off the boring slides with numbers. Or even worse, invite customers and show even more slides. Our bosses however, in blessed wisdom, decided to take the whole company to the south of Spain to party, celebrate and have fun. No slides, no pep talk, no team building, just beach, bar and disco.
Destination? A four star hotel Fenix in Torremolinos. What? Do I mean that genuine tourist trap? Yes indeed! A city full of teenagers, gays and elderly Dutch people? Fortunately not. The place was chosen because it would be possible for us to depart at a reasonable time, around eleven in the morning, and be floating in the sea in the afternoon.
Torremolinos turned out to be very lively and friendly. Add to that the “Pick up the towel from your hotel room and at the end of the street either take your place at the El Velero terrace or dive straight into the friendly waves.” kind of holiday and you get the picture. Bliss for three straight days. And you don’t have to check the weather forecast when you go out.
Take 16 professional Microsoft architects, developers and specialists (i.e. geeks) to a location like that and what do you get? Burnt foreheads and white legs? Endless pictures of barely dressed beach creatures? A group of stupid grinning wall flowers in disco’s? Weell… lets say there was a lot of fun, fooling around and dancing. A lot of small talk with locals and tourists and a healthy dose of inter-collegial discussion on Nhibernate and the ADO.NET Entity Framework, MOSS 2007, Silverlight and what have you. A special thank you for our bosses Mark and Bart for this “Weekend Legendario”.
