Search Party

To celebrate a recent successful product launch, our organization rewarded the team with a little getaway.

Engineers love to play, so this would not be simply a party. There would be a “team-building exercise,” which we regarded with skepticism and some wariness.

It turned out to be a fun (and tiring!) afternoon, geocaching. Anticipating the usual “count off by ones” method of separating people from their buddies, I managed to land on a team with a co-worker who has some geocaching experience.

Nonetheless, it was surprisingly challenging. Each team needed to stick together, and they warned us that no team would be able to visit all the caches in the allotted time. Yes, we were working against the clock, in two one-hour sessions. “Now I know how to take all the fun out of geocaching,” my co-worker remarked as we huffed up steep trails and made sure to return to the check-in point on time.

There were a few organizational twists [team-building, remember?]. Teams needed to report their discoveries back to “headquarters” (as it were), and all teams needed to rendezvous at a central point on schedule. Those who were tardy paid a hefty penalty, losing half their points. By checking in with headquarters, we were also trying to ensure that every cache was found by a pre-ordained minimum number of teams.

Despite having the advantage of an experienced geo-cacher, we didn't do all that well. There was a premium for being the first to find any given cache, which we never managed to do. And the caches with the highest points value tended to be time-consuming: complete an additional activity after finding the cache, or solve a puzzle to discover the coordinates of the second part of the cache.

We got sweaty. We got sore. I think we managed to avoid contact with poison oak as we traipsed through thickets and looked for shortcuts.

When asked to share strategies that worked for us, I offered “Be opportunistic!” The organizer gave me a sly look. “Cheat, you mean?” Not exactly ... but with so many teams unleashed simultaneously, it would have been impossible not to notice the discovery of a nearby cache. Coopetition?

In the end, I scored a winner's ticket for a massage when another co-worker had no interest in using it. Go, team!