United Way

This noon, the United Way pledge campaign finished with a hilarious RockBand competition among teams. This campaign is a tradition of our company and this year is the fourth time for me.

The campaign starts with a company sponsored BBQ in last Friday. There are couple of activities in this week to encourage people's participation.

A traditional tower building is one of the must-go. The game rule is changed this year. Instead of building a high tower with spaghetti and marshmallow, we should build a tower using about 20 newspaper and a 2-m scotch tape. This tower should be able to support an empty coke can. Haha, our team won this game by building the highest tower, which reaches the ceil and support an empty coke can. That's a very good engineered paper tower. We use three sticks as the tripod, each was made from rolled newspaper. On top of the tripod, we stick a needle, a thin needle by rolling the newspaper together. One smart design is to insert the needle inside of the hole of the empty pop can. In this case, we don't need to find support of the can. Our design is not original, but our engineering skill is the best, so that we can make the strongest and highest tower.

This lunch time, we have the RockBand competition. I am of course one of the player in our band. We dress up a little bit, with all black shirt and sunglasses. Some other bands dressed with long wig and interesting hats. That's really funny seeing people are really into this game. Although we are not good at playing the guitar or drum, everyone seems have a lot of fun by watching, laughing, applauding, and screaming. One of the important measurement of the performance is the costume. The loudness of the applaud is also counted as score, which is actually measured by a professional noise detector, our lab equipment. :-)

For a company with 80 percent more engineers, our games and competitions are geeky and engineering centric.

I had won a bottle of premium tequila by throwing toonie to reach the bottle from about 4 meters away. The closest win the bottle. I exchanged 5 toonies and just wanna test my luck. I had never thought I could be the winner. Fortunately, in the 3rd one, I throw the toonie very close to the bottle, like in 5 cm. That's cool.

The one week long campaign wrapped up with 24,000+ donation. That's not bad for around 115 people in the office. It's one of my favorite events every year.