Unearned Plaudits

The weekend just past saw me in Switzerland, and left me with rather a lot of blog-worthy material. I may get around to telling some of those stories over the next few days, or I might save them up until I can bore you with them in person.

My dominant experience of the weekend, though, was that I kept being given prizes and being generally congratulated, entirely due to the efforts of other people.

On Friday evening, after an exciting day of team-building, my company had their annual awards ceremony. The dress code was 'party casual', which of course means nothing to anyone. However, as I had bought an exciting new dress shirt for the party that I didn't attend last weekend (by virtue of being in Nottingham), I decided to wear that. Consequently, the evening found me in kilt, waistcoat and jacket, plus my fantastic new dress shirt and bow tie. (I was asked, if this was casual, what would I look like when I really got dressed up. The answer is exactly the same, but I would wear an actual bow tie instead of a clip-on.) As I have mentioned in a previous post, the effect was as of Superman to my normal Clark Kent, even down to the use of contact lenses instead of glasses.

(There may a future post in which this outfit is also relevant, hence my detailing it at some length.)

One of my colleagues also wore a kilt.

Anyway, the awards ceremony went on, with the various design centres from France and Germany giving out their awards. Lots of awards, for many fine projects. A long and distinguished line of engineers was formed on the stage...

Then, lastly, we came to the Edinburgh centre, for which there was only one award. However, because we're rather busy here, the people to whom the award was due were unable to attend, and couldn't join us by video conference because that would just be silly. But, because the centre really needed to have some representation amongst the winners, someone had to be nominated to collect the award...

Perhaps the strangest thing about it all was that when most of the winners had received their awards, there was a ripple of polite applause. However, when I and my be-kilted colleague made our way to the stage to collect an award we hadn't won for a project that was finished before we joined the company, the reaction was huge by comparison. Then, when the winners' photograph was to be taken, they insisted that we take prominent position in the front row.

It was all rather bizarre.

Roll on Saturday, and the team-building exercise proper. Here, we were in teams, building towers out of straws and sellotape, because how else can one's cow-bell be properly displayed? Anyway, as part of the task, one of the sub-groups was to solve riddles to gain additional building materials, and I was part of that team. Except that it quickly became apparent that I represented a net-loss of productivity - after an initial couple of really good answers, things just went horribly wrong. So, I wisely removed myself from the doings, to allow my colleagues to do their stuff.

Consequently, the team came joint-second overall. And we had to go and collect a huge pile of chocolate as our prize. Naturally, this terrible hardship was made all the sweeter because, once again, I was being given a prize, this time to keep, and again off the back of other people's efforts! Huzzah!

But I'm not done yet!

On Sunday, at the church, there was a special candlelit service in the evening. This was organised largely by Chris and Ed, but represented a huge outlay of effort on the part of many of the youth of the church. My part was to read four readings, all of them very well-known. Not exactly the hardest of work, and a fairly minor part of the whole.

Anyway, I stood up for the first reading, and started. In the short pause after the first paragraph, I became aware of a strange silence about the place, a silence I've heard once before while I've been reading. It's meaning: people were listening! Oh dear...

Well, I did the readings over the course of the evening, with only two small problems, one where I managed to miss out a key word and was forced to resort to "er...", and the second there I gestured grandly, only to lose my place in the reading and had to continue from memory while frantically seeking the correct words.

The rest of the service went without a hitch. There were several video segments, some excellent carols chosen, and a choir. As I said, my part of the whole was rather minor.

But, in keeping with the theme of the weekend, I spent the next hour or so being told how great I was, and while that is obviously true, and nice to hear, it did seem rather unfair given the efforts of everyone else. But, hey, what can you do?

(And, yes, before I finish: well done to Chris, Ed, and all those involved in putting together the service. A quality production all around.)