Can the A-Team Overcome a Natural Disaster?

I’ve really been enjoying the yogurt and cereal in the morning, as has the rest of the breakfast club (Rafael, Payel, and Suanne early; Maria and Kempton late). It is a really nice complement to the peanut butter and honey toast.

When we got to Hante (now properly spelled), we found out that Jat and Carosa would not be back again today. Apparently there was a large typhoon that was making its way through Shenzhen which had cancelled all of the flights out of there. We ran through the morning standup, which when staying on topic, took only 8 minutes today.

We then ran through our standup with Nancy, only to find out that her last day was Wednesday which was really disappointing to hear, as she definitely seems like a strong contributor and bright woman. This provided even further reinforcement that the environment really needs to change if Hante is going to continue to grow and be successful.

In the end, having a bit of time to ourselves was not a bad thing because that let us spend some time working on pulling together our final deliverables. I also had a chance to run through the pre-training of my “Giving Effective Presentations” pitch so we’d be ready to present it tomorrow.

After that, we were all hungry so we went out for lunch. We started to go back to the noodle place from yesterday (with Maria in the lead), but I decided that I was going to go back to the “shady hot pot” place. Then Katherine, Zoey, and Matthias decided that they would prefer that too, so the four of us went back over there. The place is a little dingy, but the food is delicious! I love being able to pick whatever I want to eat from the conveyor belt and just tossing it into my pot of boiling water. The seasoned chicken in particular is really good. They also have a nice peanut or soy or something sauce to go with it which is delicious. I’m really glad that we went back again. And you can’t beat the price!

The rest of the afternoon, I focused on creating the final presentation and document. We’ve done quite a bit over the last three weeks, and now the we need to go through it all again to make sure it sticks. Matthias gave his last agile topic on iterations. It was a shame that Jat and Carosa weren’t here for that because it really requires management buy in as much as anything else.

Being that it’s Tuesday, we had our last all CSC team meeting. We were primarily talking about all of the wrap up activities and where each of the teams were. There were a couple of good quips based on where the teams were in their projects. For example when we said we weren’t done yet, Kempton said, “A-Team? Sounds more like the C-Team.” To which Matthias retorted, “We’re still delivering value. What are you doing?” I was just laughing at both of them.

Since I had a big lunch at shady hot pot, I ended up passing on the small group dinner at an Indian restaurant and instead went for a run. And it turned out to be a great night for it. The humidity was down quite a bit, and it was actually a bit cooler which made for a really nice run. It was also really clear out which gave a beautiful view of the city over the water. Given that I’d seen a bunch of people swimming at the beach at nice, I even brought a towel so that I could dip my feet in the water which felt really good after running down there. It was a great way to end the evening!