School trip!

On Wednesday we had our team event, a trip to the warehouse followed by a meal out. It was very surreal because it was just like being on a school trip. At 3.30pm we all packed up our bags and shut down our computers, and got on the coach. I could tell my boss was excited as he started singing 'Woah! We're going to the warehouse!' to the tune of the Vengaboys' 'We're going to Ibiza'!

I was keeping an open mind about the warehouse, I thought it might be interesting to see what goes on there. However, when we pulled up at one of those big collections of warehouses that you see at the side of the motorway, it suddenly occured to me that it would probably be really boring. My suspicions weren't exactly quashed when we arrived and the woman meeting us asked us to leave all our coats and jackets on the coach, so that we couldn't use them to steal anything!

It was impressive to see so many boxes of shoes and racks of clothes all at once -shelving 4 stories high across 3 halls, each the size of a football pitch- but once you had said 'Oh wow, that's a lot of shoes' then that was pretty much all the excitement the warehouse had to offer... Even in the kitchen, where we were sent to wait whilst the other half of the group had their tour, all there was to entertain us was an out of order drinks machine and an empty vending machine. It was such a bleak room. Someone (cynically?) suggested that the idea behind sending us to the warehouse was to motivate us in our jobs by making us think 'Well, at least I don't work there'...

The event picked up a bit once we were at the meal, especially as all the food and drink were being paid for! It was nice to chat to a few other people from the UK team, and then at the end of the meal we all piled back on to the coach to be taken back to Berlin.

The school theme continued the next day, when we had the 'Quarterly International Marketing Meeting', which was basically fancy business speak for an assembly, where they told us what had happened in each of the countries in the last few months, and what was planned for the future. There were awards for particularly good workers, and some of us even sat cross legged on the floor!

There were drinks on offer after the meeting though, which would have made school assemblies more bearable I think...