Skull Camp, etc.

(Written on Monday, September 11, 2006)

So this weekend I went through the HighTeam training camp, and it was pretty amazing and grueling. I have to keep the description of the event somewhat abridged because it is a bit of a company secret, but I think I can give you an idea of what it is like. It was essentially a HighTeam boot camp. The weekend started with them giving us a card that had a skull and cross-bones in the center and the words “I want quit” below. They explained to us that, if at any time we felt like we couldn’t do what they were asking us to do, we could pass them the “I want quit” card and the pain would be over. They would let us leave. However, a permanent mark would go on our record saying that we quit in the middle of the camp. The card was overkill, in my opinion, but the camp was tough.

Throughout the entire weekend (Friday mid-day to Sunday evening), I only got about 7 Hours of sleep. I spent the other 40 hours learning the ins and outs of HighTeam’s corporate structure, completing projects, giving presentations, doing team building activities, and having an all-around good time with other employees from all three of HighTeam’s offices in China. Oh yeah, and did I mention that all of the lectures were in Chinese? Well, they were. Thankfully I had one guy on my team named Naudel who spoke good English and who was quite intelligent. It was very strange for me to have to learn everything through translation, though. I kept thinking to myself, “what if my translator isn’t picking up on the important nuances of the presentation?” and “what if the translator isn’t translating properly?” I think that this was actually very good for me though, because it forced me to be completely dependent upon my co-workers and teammates. I had no choice but to trust that they were doing what was necessary to keep me up to speed. It was very humbling.

That said, the other kids loved it when I did actually speak Chinese. The first thing I said when we were doing introductions was (in Chinese). “Hello, my name is Nathan, and I speak Chinese really poorly, so I’m going to speak in English.” For some reason, everybody started laughing and cheering. I don’t really understand Chinese humor yet, but apparently Americans who speak limited Chinese fit into the hilarious category.

My extremely shaky knowledge of the Chinese language did lead to a couple of challenges, though. Our final project was to write a marketing plan proposal to present to a company, in three hours. We got the proposal finished, and I was chosen to present along with Zhou Hua, a site-planning expert who only spoke Chinese. Moreover, before I presented I we didn’t have time to educate me about the content of the 7 or so powerpoint slides that were written entirely in Chinese, nor did we have time to educate Zhou Hua about the 13 slides that I was going to present. Surprisingly enough, the presentation went quite well, or so I thought until we hit the Q&A section. The big moment in our event plan was to have a 30+ story building wrapped as a present and to ceremonially and symbolically un-wrap the building by using some sort of mechanism at the top of the building which allowed the cloth wrapping material to fall dramatically to the ground. The only problem was that, according to the event plan (which was in Chinese), everybody was supposed to be inside the building when this happened. Kinda kills the drama huh? So the first question directed to me after the presentation was, “How do you plan to unwrap the building when the people who are supposed to participate in the ceremony are inside the building?” “How in the Hell should I know!!!” was what I thought to myself; I assumed that my teammates were smart enough to make sure that the big, dramatic moment in our event was properly planned. So I stood up there, thought for about one second and said, “I believe that this question could best be answered by Zhao Hua, our logistics expert.” Then I turned to him and waved him on stage, and asked the judges, “Could you ask the question again in Chinese?” They did, and he answered. I still have no Idea what he said, but they seemed amazingly satisfied considering our clear lack of communication. So that was it. And our team received the highest score of all four teams for our event plan and presentation. Wow.

Oh, another fun thing about skull camp. They have MAFIA, the role playing game, here in China! If you haven’t played Mafia before, a) you should, and b) you probably won’t understand this paragraph very well. So about 13 Chinese kids and I played Mafia on the second night (when we probably should have been sleeping), and it was awesome. About five of them spoke some English, so that made the game progress pretty smoothly, but it was very funny trying to debate with people when I didn’t know what they said until somebody translated for them. Then, I would have to make a rebuttal and have it translated for them. I don’t know how much of the arguments were lost in translation, but the game worked out very well and was as fun as ever.

By the time skull camp was over, I was completely exhausted (though not ready for sleep since I drank two Red Bulls to stay awake for the final presentation), so my friend Erica and I got some foot massages. Man that was nice. I really need to start budgeting my money so I can do that more often! But . . . whatever.

Today it was back to work. My boss let me come in at noon because he knew that I was tired (he’s really nice). And after I came in I found out that I’m going to be given a leadership role planning and executing an Urban Safari after an event for some Intel VIPs (at least that’s my understanding for now; I’ll write more about it after I have some meetings about it). Pretty cool huh? I hope so, cause I have a feeling it’s going to be a lot of work.

That’s all I have for right now. I’ll try and write more soon, but the internet in my apartment is currently not working, so I don’t know how often I’ll be able to post for the time being.