(no subject)

This morning was given over to a 'Getting To Know You' session, to allow the people from the various departments that make up our division to, well, get to know each other. We started with an icebreaker, where each of us was given a sheet of paper with 10 boxes on, to be filled with the name of someone in the room who fitted a description such as 'Knows how to dry stone wall', 'Has a cat called Womble', etc. There were about five different sheets in circulation, so about 20% of the people were looking for the same things as you, plus a few of the attributes appeared on two sheets, so you didn't necessarily have to speak to everyone else in the room - sharing info was part of the exercise. A couple of the ladies on my table had 'Has been to Wembley' on theirs, so they straight away asked me - that was a yes. I was also able to satisfy people who were looking for someone who had been to Australia, been to Dublin, or flown in a Chinook helicopter, or spoke a foreign language. Sue my line manager asked what my car was called, and was bitterly disappointed that it doesn't have a name - 'Has named his/her car' was on her sheet. It was a shame that fellow Hawk Simon, a regular marathon runner, doesn't work in our division as 'Has run a marathon' was one that nobody managed to get ticked. Nobody found a dry-stone waller either; one lady's husband can do it but he wasn't in the room.

After that we had a quiz. I managed to supply my team with the answers to about fifteen of the 25 questions and the ladies got several more - when the guy overseeing proceedings announced that every team had to have a name, Demelza wrote 'Wilhelmus's Girls' across the top of the sheet. We came third, though the quizmaster cheated : one of the questions was 'In which country is Saragosa?' and we guessed Chile. Afterwards we were told it was Spain. I pointed out to my Girls that the Spanish city is Zaragoza (with the z's pronounced th).

Then we were let loose on the cakes that had been submitted for the competition, and very tasty they were too, especially a brownie - I never found out who made it. I wasn't the only one to notice that two of the four prizewinners, Rachael and Ben, were the two organisers of the contest...

Back at our desks, late in the afternoon Pam asked if we were interested in Wimbledon. We chorused yes, and she announced that Federer was out. Cheers from Chris, a Nadal fan, though she was a little sobered when a glance at Google told us that her Latin lover was 5-1 down in the first set. Sue reckoned he'd been over-celebrating Spain's win at football last night...