Daily Dose of Sultnpapper 12/12/17> the California trip leftovers….

I got so wrapped up with the weather, milk jugs, and Steemit stats I failed to fill in the little details of my trip last week. I guess that wouldn’t surprise any of you that the old man got side tracked, so I will fill you in now.

To the best of my knowledge there are no warrants for my arrest in the State of California, so that is good thing. I did get locked up for a little while but that had more to do with being stupid than any criminal activity.

Have you ever heard of a company named “Smart Hunts”? I didn’t think so; Smart Hunts is a really neat concept of mixing the old fashioned scavenger hunt with hi-tech gadgets and a few tasks from like those on the Amazing Race television program. We had seventy people at our company meeting and being that this activity was part of our “team building” portion of the meeting, participation was required.

I’ve been holding off on telling this story because Smart Hunts was suppose to share all the photos and videos from our scavenger hunt with the team, I haven’t seen an email with the link to the files yet, if I wait any longer though it will be a distant memory for me. I would have liked to have some of those, so I could let the pictures do the talking.

The seventy of us were split into eight teams using a “blind draw” method by Smart Hunts. Each team was assigned a “color” and those colors were on the bandannas that we were each given to wear. The team that I was a part of had the color green, we appropriately named ourselves the “Mean Green Machine”. Each team was also given an I-Pad that was loaded with a map of downtown Riverside, California. Also included on the device was the list of what we needed to scavenge.

The scavenger hunt had a long list of over 150 “tasks” that the teams could choose to do to earn points. There were four mandatory tasks that had a Smart Hunts representative at the location to time the task or verify that it was completed as required. The team had to either take pictures or a video of each task as it was completed, then upload it to the Smart Hunts server via the wireless feature of the I-Pad.

The Mean Green machine was at a huge disadvantage right from the start; only two people on our team had ever used an I-Pad. Throw in that none of us had any local knowledge of the town except where the final check in place was, Lake Alice Bar & Grill.

Mainly the tasks involved finding locations and taking pictures of the team at those locations. The mandatory events included things like putting a puzzle together blind folded, a relay race, a balancing act and a quick game of scrabble. The time constraints were that you needed to be checked in at the bar no sooner than two hours and no later than three hours. All of the items on the list had point values ranging from 100 points to 500 points for the elective tasks; I’m not sure what the points were for the mandatory items.

I don’t know how many miles we covered in those three hours but I can tell you that by the time I was sitting in the bar with a cold Corona & slice of lime, my knees and back were telling me that I had overdone it. My knees had been giving me trouble since being cramped up on the plane the day before. My guess is that we covered at least three miles and maybe more.

The highlight or low-light of the Mean Green Machine’s scavenger hunt was me getting myself locked up. We were in a section of downtown that might be considered a high crime area; all the building had iron bars on the windows and doors. I wouldn’t think that people would put them on their businesses just for decoration.

One particular place was called the James Town Annex; it appeared to be an older home that was converted into a small office building. The front porch had iron bars that made the porch have the appearance of a jail cell, and a door that was iron bars as well. With my green bandanna on my head and my grey goatee facial hair I looked the part of an old thug who could very well have gotten in some trouble, so I was selected to be the person who got “locked up”.

So, I got up on the porch of this building, behind the bars, and the team had to do a video of them singing a song and then they would pan the camera over to me dancing behind the “cell door”. Well that damn lock on the cell door needed a key to open it, when I closed the iron bar door it locked my butt up. They team thought I was joking, they kept saying let’s go, let’s go. I kept saying, “I’m fxing locked in here.”

Luckily, there was an intercom button and a list of four different businesses. I started pushing buttons but got no response. We had just left Rocco’s Bail Bonds next door to the place where I was locked up; I told the team to go see if Rocco had any connections in this building. Rocco did and he made a couple phone calls and then after about 10 minutes a lawyer came down from an upstairs office with a key to the gate.

He said he looked out the window and saw a bunch of guys with green bandanna's from his window and he wasn’t coming down to find out what was going on, if it hadn’t been for Rocco vouching for us there is no telling how long I might have been “locked up”.

Our team ended up finishing within the time frame; we got a bunch of the elective tasks completed and the required ones as well. We didn’t even have a sniff of winning or finishing in the top three, but we weren’t last. Our official finish was next to last, but we did have a good time over all.

I had mentioned prior to going about the shuffleboard games that always take place in the evenings. Those games take place at Lake Alice Bar & Grill, as much money as the company spends at that place we should just go ahead and buy the dang joint.

It turned out that with my back and knees killing me, I was best suited to drink Corona’s and eat tacos, it was Taco Tuesday. The other factor was that we always play as “teams” and my team mate from years past is retiring on Jan.5, 2018 so the company told him to stay home and relax, they weren’t flying him out from Texas and spending the money on a short timer. I didn’t feel like having to find a partner who I didn’t know as far as their shuffleboard skills. I had a few of the newer people ask me to partner with them, but that chair was the only” partner” I needed, that and the Coronas.

For as negative of an attitude as I had prior to making the trip and despite being in a car accident, getting locked up, and ending up sore as hell for four days, it was a good trip over all. I almost think someone in the corporate office might be reading my blog; they actually had beef fajita’s one night. The other nights were pretty good food choices as well; the final night was a traditional holiday meal with turkey, ham, mashed potatoes, gravy and dressing.

So, to finish up here, smarthunts.com is the website for this company that puts on these corporate events. I talked with Lisa Enochs, our facilitator for the event. She said that they currently only operate in the USA, Canada, and Mexico. She does all the research online for each city and picking the locations, she had never been to Riverside. She found places that seemed interesting, got on the phone or emailed them and explained what she was setting up. Lisa told me that it is pretty fun work and she has learned a bunch about several different cities because of her work. Evidently it is pretty lucrative as well, the girl in our office who set this up said it was about $8,000 for five hours of Lisa’s and her four assistants time with us.

When Lisa left shortly after our awards presentation she and her team were heading to the airport, they had another event on Wednesday in Phoenix, Az. She did say that they have packages that are less expensive and are “self guided”, meaning they will do the research, set everything up but no onsite facilitator. If you happen to be in another country and think this might be something you would be interested in doing you may want to contact Smart Hunts, who knows, you might just find what seems like a pretty neat gig.

I looked at their website; their clientele consists of some high powered corporations that aren’t reluctant to spend money on team building. Had I been in charge of the team building event it would have been a Texas Hold ‘Em poker tournament or shuffleboard and beers at Lake Alice, and I would have done it for a quarter of the fee of Smart Hunts, all the company had to do was ask.

Until next time,
@sultnpapper
#unmentionables

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