team building, my style

I'm in San Antonio this week because I was selected to attend a boot camp. I'm the first person from my area to ever be selected to attend in the 10 years the camp's been running. No pressure. I was given a list of people I was supposed to network with.

The first day I did no networking and instead stood on one side of the conference room fake smoking while the other participants, who all knew each other, stood on the other side having fun.

But slowly they started to like me, especially after I started giving them free training sessions and fixed some of the problems they've been having. There are two guys in their early 30s, Jaf and Zack, who have glommed on to me.

I was telling Jaf about my flying lessons and he said "I want to learn to fly too!" and I said (because he's pakistani) "you guys only need to use the simulator". Haha. Jaf also wanted to go surfing with me this weekend. As if. I'm not going because the surf conditions are horrible. Instead he and Zack and I are going to learn to race go carts.

Today at lunch we were all standing in the kitchen and Jaf offered me a pretzel ball. I said I couldn't eat it because it had peanut butter in the center. Jaf and Zack were then like "oh, I'm allergic to THE WORLD" in girly voices. I gave them the finger so Zack threw a pretzel ball at me. It broke into a bunch of pieces. So I squirted some foam hand soap into my palm and threw it at Zack. It got on his shirt so he grabbed a can of air freshener and sprayed me with it (why are guys at work always attacking me with aerosols?).

I finally wrestled it away from him and ran through the kitchen into the training room, Zack and Jaf in hot pursuit. I knocked over a bunch of chairs to slow them down and then ran into the ladies' room, where I left the air freshener. I waited about 5 minutes and figured it was safe to head back to the training room. But as I walked in Jaf and Zack jumped out from behind a partition and started throwing dry erase board markers at me. I threw them back until the instructor came in and yelled at us.

I smelled like "christmas spruce" (the name of the air freshener) for the rest of the afternoon.

The worst part about the whole story is we had a big exam today and I didn't study last night because I was researching things to do on the weekend and was supposed to study on lunch break, not get into marker fights. I got to class early this morning with the thought of studying but then got distracted fixing a problem for a colleague. And the woman who is the director for the group hosting the boot camp said she was going to sit next to me to cheat off me and I was like "oh shit, if I fail, she fails...will I get fired?"

Anyway, I got the highest score in the class on the exam (97%) even though it was really hard. And the director passed (but with a lower score than me because she didn't totally cheat off me). Out of 15 of us 5 failed the exam.

I told my program manager I am networking and team building as instructed but didn't mention that I was doing that by destroying our class room and throwing markers at my fellow students.

Now, since I'm in Texas, I'm off to have a steak.