How do you celebrate a record breaking, successful year of working hard and pushing to the max? You poke fun at the people you work with every day, of course.
Unified Technologies’ company anniversary was last Thursday and Jayme Lunde and I decided to host the first annual UT Undies. In the Style of The Office’s Dundie awards we created an award for each employee. It would have been easy to give each person the “Hardest Working Undie” – everyone deserved it. But we took it a little bit further and funnier.
We found some cardboard cut outs and with the help of a little gold paint and some blocks of wood we fashioned the now infamous UT Undie.
It was pretty easy to come up with awards for some people but we quickly found out that there were employees that we just didn’t know well; like the infrastructure team who come in to the office well before 8 and are out and on the job all day. So, we recruited a couple people from their department to give us some interesting dirt on their coworkers. They were glad to tell us some very funny, very unusual stories and we found ourselves learning a lot. For example Jeremy Taylor, Infrastructure Technician, is afraid of owls. Really? That would make a great Undie. And apparently Mike Frazier, also an Infrastructure Technician, fell through a ceiling on a job. Yeah, we could definitely use that.
A little quiet observation and soon we had 36 Undies – one for each employee of the company.
The first order of business on Thursday was to get a good “Company picture”. We somehow managed to have all 36 employees present for the shot. The group from our Lexington office made the trip over and Kim Couch, Engineer, and Andi Reyes, Project Engineer, took an hour away from an installation down the street to pose for us. After taking a several group pictures, we gathered for dinner and Jayme Lunde and I proceeded to pass out the highly coveted awards. Mike Avery, Account Representative, won the “Sharp Dressed Man” Undie – for looking so fine in clothes his wife lays out for him every day.” His thank you speech went something like this. “My wife lays my clothes out at home and I get my Undies at work!”
It was fun. It was much needed. And now, we’ll keep our eyes open for material to use next year.
So if you see a UT technician, Project Manager or happen to have a Sales Rep sitting in front of you be sure to ask them about their Undies.
