FE Team Event: The American way of Kegeln

Deep in the heart of Friedrichshain happens to be a nice bowling alley. Driven by the urge to leave the known surroundings for a while, the guys and gals from the frontend team took hold of their PO and all available backend engineers (Kingpin Jani) to take off into this unknown realm.  

Before any physical effort could be undertaken, some food had to be devoured alongside some tasty Indian cocktails at, you might have guessed it, a charming Indian restaurant. Now strengthened and ready for action, preparations were made to start the hunt for turkeys.  

Split into two groups; two lanes and pins were put under siege of heavy bowling balls. Luck and skill swayed back and forth for most of the time. Magical potions like vodka ahoy helped sustain the teams stamina longer than anybody else inside the joint. The general prowess of Sophie and Matej was hunted for by the others but could not be reached. Tactics were exchanged and tried. Strikes and spares were cheered upon. Both groups played end to end, piling up hundreds of fallen pins along the way.  

After all electronics were shut down, only the brave developers (and Tom of course) remained to further celebrate that glorious evening and delve into many a story.

Business Intelligence Team Event

The lovely BI team all met up for Lasertag at 16.30 and headed over to West Berlin (via the shop for some supplies for the half hour journey). Once there we all suited up and went through the safety briefings and got acquainted with our "weapons" as well as putting some laser hit markers on our velcro tennis bands before heading off into the Arena for games. 

First game consisted of an all v all melee with five lives which resulted in complete chaos, laser beams flying everywhere and some who would scream quite loudly whenever someone shot at them. 

Second game again elimination with the addition of teams denoted by glowsticks stuck into our headbands. It quickly became apparent that some players were taking a human wave approach to "combat" with hilarious results. Special mention goes to one blonde BI member who's vietkong-esque sneaky tactics meant about three people were trying to look for him by the end of the game. We were half expecting him to come out with his face painted in mud and Camouflaged with leaves (which would've been dumb as we were playing in a warehouse).

By the second half of the evening we were all nicely warmed up so the next round was team v team again with the addition of competition. With the team with the most points in 10 minutes winning. Victory went to the reds quite decisively with some extremely aggressive kamikaze tactics in play especially from the CRO team members resulting in very high scoring. 

The final round was the most complicated with a team ground domination game where we had to control the area around "the atomic weapon" for as long as possible and/or capture the bomb from the other team. Again aggressive play and fearless/suicidal tactics from the Red team members but with the additional requirement of a long walk back to the other side of the arena for every death the final round went to the Blues slightly more methodical approach.

Possibly this victory was aided by an "accident" resulting in one of the reds nursing a black eye and the reds a man/woman down. These accusations of dirty tactics are of course emphatically denied by the Blue team....

The evening was finished up in a nearby argentinian/mexican/spanish restaurant with a split personality disorder (Capirinhas with Tapas!? blasphemy I say....) and an extremely exciting sounding hazelnut schnapps which, as it turned out, was just Hazelnut flavoured Baileys, can't have everything I suppose....

Overall chalk up another successful BI social with 100% less inebriated Judo practice. Always a success by my standards. 

                                                                                                                 Written by Tom

My Apprenticeship at DP

Hello, my name is Lina and I’m a 19 year old office management apprentice at DP.

My apprenticeship began on the first of September after a 3 month internship here. Obviously this previous experience helped a lot when my apprenticeship started as I already knew everybody and had a good idea of my tasks. When school started again (I work part time with school) I was really well prepared and had a great overview about what would be happening during the apprenticeship.

It was easy to feel welcome at DP with all the “Beer Friday’s”, parties and team events. The company is very international and open minded, so you can always be who you want to be.

Now I’ve been here for almost 8 months and I have had a lot of different and interesting tasks. I work at reception, what means I’m in contact with a lot of people e.g. other employees, external visitors, interviewees or the postman.  My tasks sitting at the reception are accepting phone calls, preparing meeting rooms or interviews, welcoming new employees, sorting and distributing letters and ordering office supplies. I also have the responsibility of booking business trips, along with accommodation or tickets for exhibitions and conferences. 

I also get an overview of HR work, my task there is to refresh the job ads on various websites.

There are also these routine tasks like making coffee for visitors or watering the plants. :-)

In general I’m the contact for everyone with questions, I try to make everything work for the other employees and in particular the newbies and make sure they know how everything works at DP.

My next step will be to work together with the finance team and I’m really looking forward to getting to know all their tasks.

In conclusion: I’m very glad to be working at DP, I like my tasks and I feel like an important part of the team with a lot of responsibility and I’m happy to be part of the puzzle. :-)