Making a Difference
Life at a startup can be pretty hectic. It might seem that in the Eat — Code — Play equation, coding dominates by far, but every so often we manage to sneak out from beneath the fluorescent lights and have some fun in the real world.
A few weeks ago we were lucky enough to have the vast majority of our team in one location and decide to take advantage of it. Recently we sat down as a team and established our core values, one of which is: make a difference. As part of that, we have wanted to prioritize community service so we decided to help out at Second Harvest Food Bank. Second Harvest does some amazing work distributing over a million pounds of food a week. They have a strong focus on not only providing food, but providing fresh and nutritious fruits and vegetables to those who need it. They receive daily shipments of donated or purchased food from farmers around the region and then unleash their volunteers on it to help sort and repackage it for distribution to their service providers.
For half a day we got to be experts on plums. We all received the “gift” of being able to decide whether a plum was good in about 0.5 seconds. Also how to judge just exactly how many plums you need to make a 25 pound box. So we are basically set for some very, very specific fair games. It was an awesome way to get out and do some manual labor, relax with the team, and make a difference in the community.
It wasn’t all work though, after volunteering we heading to the park and picked up some sandwiches from Los Gatos Meats & Smokehouse. To say they were delicious would be an understatement. Apparently we weren’t the only ones who thought so, as we were immediately ambushed by a swarm of very aggressive bees looking to snag a bite. Nothing like checking every bite of your sandwich for a bee to make you really appreciate nature…
It was at this point that we also discovered we had a corn-hole hustler in our midst as Gil lead his team to victory from a 7 point deficit by sinking ALL FOUR BAGS. Quite the demoralizing turn of events for yours truly.
In another first for many of us, we headed down the street to Campo di Bocce for a genteel game of bocci. As someone who has only ever played at the beach, I can say it takes an amazing amount of skill (or luck) to play bocci on a hard court. Learning to ‘drop’ the ball with just the right amount of forward momentum was a challenge to say the least.
After a full day of volunteerism and hand-eye coordination, we wound things down with an evening at Faultline. Conveniently located next to a Pokemon gym for those who want to play (and let’s be honest, who doesn’t? Editor’s note: This was a few weeks back, apparently Pokemon Go was so last month now), it was the perfect way to wind down an event filled day.
I’ve had the good fortune to work on many excellent teams, but few have felt as much like a family as RealScout. This was a great opportunity to pull back from coding, contribute to the community, and just hang out with a great group of people enjoying a beautiful day in sunny California.
