The Planet Blog

You’ve seen a few glimpses of our company culture in recent blog posts, so it’s only fitting that you hear about a little boating competition last weekend, care of the Texas Dragon Boat Association.

Our CFO Kevin Klausmeyer threw down the gauntlet a couple months ago in a team-wide email: “Let’s pit the managers against the rest of the company, and see who wins in a 250-meter dragon boat race down Buffalo Bayou.” Most of the folks around the office had never heard of dragon boating prior to Kevin’s email, but as soon as the inter-office challenge was put on the table, everyone made a point to find any relevant YouTube videos and Wikipedia articles and start training for what was sure to be an epic showdown.

The Texas Dragon Boat Association’s May Festival course accommodates three 22-person dragon boats at a time — each dragon boat having one “drummer,” twenty paddlers and one steersperson. Each team races at least three times and needs a minimum of 8 females and 8 males in the boat for each race.

Before you write off the athleticism of the event and start humming “Row, Row, Row Your Boat,” you should note that these dragon boats can range from 30 to 100 feet long and only a few feet wide (just enough for one paddler on each side), each race is less than two minutes, and it’s a full-body workout. Teamwork and technique are the two most important components in a dragon boat race, so each of our teams had several practices to get everyone on the same page.

The managers chose to race under the name “The Planet Big Dogs,” so it was only fitting that the non-managers entered the competition as “The Planet Underdogs.” The other teams in the event couldn’t help but fear us as they read our team’s description in the program:

The Planet is widely regarded as an industry-leading IT Infrastructure provider. With multiple data centers, an incredible network and stellar support, we provide small- and medium-sized businesses with customized hosting solutions to fit their needs. We also harbor a secret: The Planet’s recent move to the Bayou Place in downtown Houston was not as innocent as it seemed … it was a strategic move to attract the former Olympians currently slated to paddle for us in the dragon boat races. Following a recent trip to the Yangtze River in China where we practiced our craft on the backs of real dragons, The Planet’s teams have consistently averaged 63 mph in nightly training races at a secret underground facility. In the interest of sportsmanship (and because we hate making our opponents cry), we will disguise our teams as a couple of rag-tag groups of first-time dragon boaters for this event. Autographs, training tips and a dragon boat DVD/Blu-Ray lecture series will be available to the losing teams at a nominal fee following the event.

Saturday rolled around, and everyone showed up to our luau-themed tent in their team shirts, and it was finally time to back up all the inter-office smack talk. Immediately prior to the race, the Underdogs were confident, the Big Dogs were creative: Doug came over to let us know “The winning team is accepting a 10% decrease in salary,” and the rest of the managers were quick to remind us that our yearly performance reviews were coming up soon.

Undaunted, the Underdogs took to the boat, and we made our way to the starting line. Apparently, the pride of the victory wasn’t going to be reward enough, so a last-minute wager was placed: the losing team has to buy and serve lunch to the winning team. The race was on: a team from Cafe Express in boat #4, the Underdogs in boat #5, and the Big Dogs in boat #6.

Always bet on the Underdogs.

The Big Dogs were very gracious in defeat, and we had a great time cheering for each other in rest of the day’s races.

In addition to the awards given to the fastest boats of the day, the TDBA gave a special “Spirit of the Dragon” award to the team that showed the most energy, involvement, and excitement. I’ll save you the suspense:

We won!

We had more than 100 participants, family, friends and cheerleaders throughout the day, so we’ve got a LOT of pictures from the event. I’ll be posting them on a dedicated “Dragon Boat Pictures” blog page so you can retroactively participate vicariously.

-Kevin

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 7th, 2008 at 6:30 pm and is filed under Evangelist's Corner, Fun Stuff, The Planet. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.