The Celebration We Earned

Quite at the initial stage of my career, I was working with an amazing team. A geographically diverse but a very well bonded team. We used to brainstorm and work together through the day on voip calls and screen sharing through office communicator. Working on a product, it needed a lot of collaboration and thinking out of the box to make it a world class product. We were making something to overcome the challenges of an already established industry standard tool. The initial product was already there before I joined. However, it still needed a lot of work based on the user experience. Everyday we came in with a new challenge, understand what our users had challenges with and tried to resolve them one after the other. After a couple of months which spanned a few years, we had taken it to a level where it had not only overcome the challenges of the existing industry tool but had also come out better. The extra ordinary implementations we did were appreciated far and wide on various internal platforms. We were eventually awarded the most prestigious organizational award of that time. My team lead who was based out of Hyderabad proposed to have an outing in Hyderabad. Majority of the team was there so 2 of us from Pune travelled to Hyderabad. One of my team mates came to pick us up from the railway station and dropped me at another team mate's place early in the morning. As it was quite early, all her other roommates had been sleeping while her sleep was disturbed as I had knocked in. We sat in her living room talking for some time until it was decent morning for others to wake up. As her room got vacated while her roomie was getting ready, I was offered that place to get some rest before we could get ready. I lay on a mattress in her room when my parents called from home enquiring about my journey, food etc. It was time, I had to get up to get ready for office. Yes, we had come for the celebration but not at the cost of work. Work was still utmost important and we were already warned by our manager against having any impact 😀

We got ready and reached office late by Pune standards but in time by the local standards. My team mate introduced me to our team including the extended team with whom we worked very closely. Those were the days of desktops with no option of remote working either on laptops or through phones. We caught up with our respective work and anything urgent that needed attention before gathering together again to plan for the evening and the following days. For the few days that we were in Hyderabad, every evening was a celebration of the hard work, commitment, dedication and team work that we all had done over the years. We would wrap up our work a little earlier, candidly requested others in the team to be cautious of what they were doing so they don't need our assistance while we were away !! We worked hard during the day and went out to explore the city and have fun in the evenings. The pictures would be sent to our manager who was the major source of inspiration and a guiding light for our success. However she was unable to join us from Bangalore due to other priorities. Our celebration concluded and we returned back to Pune moving ahead with our routine.