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A very warm welcome

Last week we had a great welcoming session for our new office, with some of our new, ongoing and potential clients/friends/partners (and “partners”).

manifesto-welcome-drinks

BUT FIRST… A friend recently reminded me…

Flashback: It was one of those chats that gives rather a lot of perspective – a big impact – a sense of “oh boy” (as Sam from Quantum leap would say). It was coming up to my 32nd birthday and a short conversation went a little like this:

Me: My 32nd next week. Feels like I’ve been on this planet for quite a few years now!

Friend: Well just think of all those years; add 5 or so more and then realise that’s how much longer you’ve got to work!

And with that I started to look for a new job – which rather splendidly landed me here.

OK. So, where was I? Oh yes – the welcoming session.

So I guess we kicked it off by learning more about the colleagues I work with. At a team meeting we discussed our favourite toys from our childhood days.

The three owners of the business certainly seemed to match their older selves in their younger choices: Simon (who does a lot of stuff with Java and Drupal development and other such technical bits that I don’t understand), had fond memories of a programmable vehicle called big track.

Curtis (aka the Fatwire and Oracle WebCentre Sites guru) was a big lover of the Commodore 64 – again a perfect match.

And then Jim with Screwball Scramble (insert screwball joke here after probation date has past)… Actually, it does match up with present day Jim who, as CEO, overlooks many important components; steers the company through a maze of great projects; knows all the skills that are required for each; understands the timing of projects and precision thinking…

Okay, so maybe a screwball joke would have been more fun!

We chucked carefully placed IT stuff in the great Mad Men-esque meeting room and set out one or two beers, bottles of wine, cokes, pizzas etc and welcomed developers, UX designers, Scrum Masters, Directors and many more.

It was great to meet a lot of the people I’ve been emailing since working here. And it’s really great to be able to say that and mean it!

Sharing a drink, amazing pizza and good banter. Because we work on interesting, compelling and worthwhile projects (here’s some for your perusal in case ya don’t believe me) the people who came along were very much like that as well – kind of like how the childhood toys reflected the people who played with them.

The night was great (although the following morning was a little hazy) so I look forward to the next!

Working for a company like Manifesto should help to make these next 32 + 5 or so years quite worthwhile!

Cheers!

Here’s a few more snaps from the night:

welcome-drinks-6

 

welcome-drinks-1

 

welcome-drinks-7

 

Oh, and I feel it fitting to slap the slides that were playing through the event here:

welcome-drinks-slides

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