This was in 2009. My office was near Canary Wharf, London. I was working for Lloyds TSB then.
The T20 Cricket World Cup was going on in England at that time.
We were working on some projects with very challenging deadlines and hence I had not planned to go to any matches. One afternoon around 2pm I realised that there is a West Indies-England match at Lord's starting at 3pm. After a busy and frustrating first half of the day, I just felt like getting out of office. Lord's was just a 30 min tube journey from office and it was all too tempting.
Luckily my boss was also off that day. I quickly discussed this with 3 of my team members who are also Cricket crazy. Me being their Project Manager, they were initially a bit taken aback, but quickly (and happily) consented to the plan.
By nature, I am not at all adventurous. I was surprised why and how I was doing this, but something just clicked that day............
There was only one hitch. There was an important conference call at 4pm where we all had to be there.
Throwing caution to the wind I said - 'We will join the call from Lord's Cricket Ground' !!
And so very quietly we slipped out of the office, took the tube and got down at St. John's Wood Station. As fate would have it, tickets were available, and we took our seats.
I was feeling a bit unreal......just an hour back we were in office, testing software, raising defects, replying to mails.......and now at Lord's !!
We all logged into the conference call while the match was on, Luke Wright and Ravi Bopara were hitting fours and sixes. There was lot of noise in the ground. The people in call asked - 'What's all the noise about?'.........we brushed that aside with some excuse. The people sitting beside us were very puzzled to hear us talk about 'so many defects were raised and so many are still outstanding...........!!'. What did they know that we were giving 'mixing work with pleasure' a new meaning......and that we had pulled off something which was unimaginable a couple of hours earlier.
What a day at work.............If only I can do this more often !!
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