Team- and sandwich-building, or, Zucchinis make the best rolling pins

Today was certainly a strange day. Despite the fact that we currently have lots to do (end of season reports and our 2012 program plans are due next week), my colleague and I spent the entire day in the tearoom kitchen of our museum preparing sandwiches.

You see, it's our sister museum's 35th anniversary this year (woot!) and tonight is their celebration. Staff and volunteers from over the years as well as special guests and even the mayor will be there; it's quite a big deal. Of course, food needed to be provided and our boss said, "Hey, we can do it." Little did he know that the part-timers who usually help out with that sort of thing would all be busy. Go figure.

So in the time-honoured museum tradition of doing whatever needs to be done ourselves, my colleague and I were tasked with making 600 finger sandwiches. Fancy finger sandwiches, mind you, nothing easy. We're talking ham and pear, pate and goats cheese, cucumber with mint and turkey and apple. All very labour intensive, we soon learned.

Oh, and they needed 150 scones, too.

And my boss needed to leave at 4:30 to get them to the museum on time. Nice.

It wasn't so bad. We were pretty slow, but had a few made when my colleague sliced open her finger and flailed around our recently-sanitized kitchen.

"Stop flailing!!! The sandwiches!!" I cried, obviously seriously concerned for her personal safety.

I handed her a paper towel to clamp over her bleeding finger. We ran through the museum looking for band aids (of course, they're never there when you need them), passing our boss and one of the other managers who were giving two grant-approval ladies a tour of the museum. I'm sure we looked very professional.

Eventually we hid in the basement bathroom and bandaged her up before returning to see the damage to the kitchen.

There was blood spatter everywhere. On the walls, the floor, her workstation... Thankfully my area was clean, but the sandwiches she was working on had to all be thrown out. And she happened to be right next to all our bread. Great.

So she sanitized the kitchen (again) and I ran out to get more bread. Meanwhile, our boss was finished with the grant people and came in to help with baking scones. Thank god.

"Do we have a rolling pin?" he asked.

"I think so, but I don't know where it is."

My colleague laughed and said, "You could use this." and handed him an obnoxiously large zucchini from the museum garden that had been kicking around for a few days.



It looked just like this one, actually.
But I swear it was the size of my calf!

 He used it. It was awesome.

This set the tone for the rest of the afternoon. Despite the fact that we all had lots to do, we worked together to get all the food done for our sister museum. It was... nice, I have to say.

I'm sure that it's the case with many workplaces that despite the fact that you all work together, you rarely actually just chat. Usually we're all busy on big projects that require our full attention, or are simply at remote sites (like me) or alone in the upstairs office (like my boss); it's rare nowadays to work together on something that allows you to chat casually. I think in many cases you also feel that you need to appear busy at all times, which is unfair, really.

Today was nice in many respects: we helped out our sister museum, we weren't sitting at a computer all day, and most of all, I got to spend some quality time with my colleagues. Team building is something that often gets pushed to the side in favour of more "productive" items, but I personally think we need to spend more time on it.

600 sandwiches later, I feel like we're more of a team than ever before.