Bear Walker Crew Crawfish Boil

By: Thom Kilgor

This past Thursday we had our team appreciation/picture day complete with a crawfish boil, bonding exercises, and a highly intense trivia game. We shut down production at a half-day and gathered out in the parking lot of the shop, assembling tables, taping plastic over the top, and serving up 70 lb. of Louisiana crawfish. The air was crisp with a January chill, and together we warmed our bellies on crawfish tails, sausage, and veggies. There were a few of us who had never tried crawfish and had to be shown the correct method for extracting the delicious bite in the tail. As the midday sun pierced the morning gloom and we collectively tore into piles of delicious crustaceans, we all became a bit closer to one another. A feast is the ideal team-building exercise. When everyone had eaten our fill, we gathered together in the large common room for a few party games. First, there was the classic "Two truths and a lie" which was intended to push us past our shyness into opening up to one another and it worked. People opened up about previous lives, faraway travels, and the bones they have broken. It was a little fascinating to catch such small glimpses at the lives of people you work around daily but don't really open up to usually. People really are funny like that, we fall into routines in our daily lives even in how we relate to one another. 

If the previous games had brought us closer together as a unit, group trivia threatened to pry us apart. We were split into groups designed to connect us with others from outside our usual circles and pitted against one another in an incredibly tense game of trivia. Each round tested our knowledge, our teamwork, and our resolve. Questions were from across disparate categories of general knowledge and there were few straightforward answers. In the end, the team that had been lagging behind snatched a victory from under everyone's noses in an exhilarating turnaround. 

While there will always be that next goal or destination in life, events like our crawfish boil remind us how vital it is to pace ourselves and make time for one another. As an organization, our goal is to provide breathtakingly impressive products that are as aesthetically pleasing as they are functional. The best way we are able to do that is by keeping our team strong, balanced, and cohesive, and events like these are crucial to that process. As Abraham Lincoln is alleged to have said, "Give me six hours to chop down a tree, and I'll spend the first four sharpening my axe."