puzzle people

This morning, we had a session on being a good team member and team dynamics. It was so much fun - the best session we've done so far, in my opinion. I'll see if I can explain what we did. Most people were sitting at numbered tables and were the Team. They had a puzzle to put together. Some people, like us, were Volunteers. We were assigned 3 tables to go "help" every six minutes.

Sounds normal so far, right? It was, except that we were also assigned attitudes. My husband's attitude was "my other team did this better", and my attitude was "life's a party!" Oh man it was fun. We walked over to our first table, and my husband immediately announced, "You're doing this wrong. Where I come from, they do it this way." On and on it went. I would try to entice people to leave; I'd tell them they did enough for the day, "so why don't we just leave the rest for tomorrow and go to the beach?" When that wasn't working at all, I decided to grab unused puzzle pieces and throw them in the air and shout "woo-hoo!" Then I took almost all of the not yet used pieces to another table to use, so that my group "could go have fun." It was funny to see these people get so frustrated at such a silly game! It was a great way to illustrate how long term people can get so focused on their job, they will isolate volunteers, or how volunteers come with the idea to sightsee, or be negative, etc. It was a ton of fun.

Oh I forgot to mention that we actually had puzzle pieces with us that they were missing. One table we approached, my husband actually had about 8 pieces they needed, but they refused to take them because they were so annoyed with us! haha

So that's the lesson I learned today - be patient with our teammates. We also had a session on culture shock. I'm really bracing myself for some hard core adjustment challenges. I just hope my tourist stage will last at least a few months.

We need to head out. gotta go