It’s 6:00 A.M. I park my car at the Gdańsk airport, like so many times before. I go to the gates to board a Ryanair flight to Modlin, Warsaw.
I want to check-in... but there's no queue! After a moment I discover that there’s no queue because the planes are not flying due to fog.
- I want to check-in... but there's no queue! After a moment I discover that there’s no queue because the planes are not flying due to the fog - I heard these words a couple of weeks before a very important meeting at the top of Uniqa headquarters, where I was supposed to present a system for simulating the company’s workflow and a tool to introduce gamification for employees during an event that was to take place in Łódź in a couple of weeks.
- "There is no risk! I always fly to Modlin for PLN 19, then I take a rental car and after an hour I’m at my destination," - I said.
And now I’m at the airport, the fog is thick and I’m waiting for official information. And then I get it. Instead of a plane there will be a... bus. I go outside to check the bus... and it’s articulated.
Can you get from Gdańsk to Warsaw in less than 3 hours?
It turns out you can. And you won't break any laws while doing so. It's a pity then, that instead of waiting for info about the planes I hadn’t jumped into my car and hadn't taken the A1+A2 motorway.
In the end I made it. I was late only slightly, but the presentation and the discussion went really well. But from then on I know that if we are supposed to meet with our clients in Warsaw, we choose the Pendolino train.
Apart from the issue of programming and monitoring during the event, we were also supposed to gather equipment for 300 people. Luckily, not for each individual, but one desktop and two screens per desk. The only thing left was to connect everything to the network, check if it’s working and sit comfortably through the rest of the event :) The goal was to give the participants a chance to "role-play directors" and with our application simulate how their decisions impact the company’s profits for the next 4 years. This of course was greatly simplified with the behaviours of the market imposed strictly by the system.
Marcin Prokop was leading the event, providing the audience with jokes.
When we were about to use the projector to show results for a period, he said:
- "And while the IT guys are preparing the results table, I will tell you a very interesting story..."
In a blink of an eye the results were displayed... because they were being gathered and inserted into the table in real time. All we needed to do is change the video source to the computer screen :) Prokop’s story had to wait for another pause.
During the break the event organiser approaches us and says:
- "Mr Marcin Prokop asks you to not be so efficient, because he has nothing to do."
During the next partial result summary Mr Prokop says again:
- "And while the IT guys are preparing the results table, I will tell you a very interesting story..."
So what do we do? The 5 of us sit there for 10 minutes, hunched over our laptops, pressing keys without any purpose in order to create an impression that we are working constantly to insert the numbers into the sheet...