Let me tell you about my Saturday last weekend. It was pretty awesome. Here’s why:
1) Seeing the Nuffies work together to overcome a crisis faced by some of their colleagues.
This Saturday was one of the first Saturdays ever that the Nuffies spent a full working day in the office. What happened was a couple of days before our web host Exabytes which manages a great deal of servers for us had an intrusion in their networks.
The intrusion led to the deletion of 50 of their servers and their backups. Call it bad luck but ChurpChurp was one of those 50 servers that were affected. Fortunately for us though we have a remote backup for ChurpChurp so we had something to fall back on but after restoring the backup we still had some missing information. Some accounts or reports or earnings details were missing.
The ChurpChurp team was quick in responding though. They got the site back up, made an announcement and set up a help desk for Churpers to notify them if they had any missing information so they could cross check whatever records they had and recreate those accounts. A lot of work had to be done though and the ChurpChurp team consist of a team of ten.
They knew they were understaffed. So they sent out an email to the rest of the Nuffies in the other companies in our Netccentric group and asked for help.
Everyone volunteered to clear up their Saturdays to come into work and help ChurpChurp. It was amazing. Our office was buzzing on Saturday with everyone working on quickly managing and responding to this crisis.
It’s at times of crisis like this where a team is really tested and I’m proud of the way the ChurpChurp team responded to this. The past few days I saw the stress in their eyes but I saw how they took turns to be each others’ strength and put up a strong front. Because of this support they had for one another, the atmosphere in the office was actually quite upbeat. Everyone was working really hard but still moments of laughter broke out throughout the day.
The vast majority of Churpers who had notified us of problems with their accounts would have their cases resolved and be notified of that in the next few days. Something that would have taken much longer than the time it took. All thanks to the whole team coming together to work on this over the weekend.
Times like these really make me realize that the core asset of a company really isn’t its website or database or technology or anything like that but is the team.
As for me…. I kinda enjoyed our Saturday in the office doing a little bit of data entry work. I joked that we should do it more often and the Nuffies stopped all they were doing and looked at me in fear. Then I said “No la no la just joking! Work life balance ok!”.
2) Got a new coffee machine!!
I took a couple hours out of my Saturday to go to Publika for this Nescafe Dolce Gusto event there were they let bloggers try their hand at making coffee with their cool coffee machine.
The first time I actually tried Nescafe Dolce Gusto was actually during a tea break at a conference I was attending. They had this booth for people to try the coffee from this machine and when I tried it I was really impressed. All you had to do was put a capsule like this that costs RM1.75 each into the machine and you can have all sorts of coffee made.
The cool part was that they let all the Nuffnang bloggers there take home a machine each along with 6 weeks supply of coffee. I now have one at home!
Woohoo!
3) Singing in the car
Sometimes it’s the simplest pleasures of a day that make me happy. Shorty and I were driving out of KL to buy the Nuffies lunch. We decided that if everyone was going to be working in the office on a Saturday we had to tarpau some really good food! We decided to take a drive to Village Park Nasi Lemak in Uptown.
On our way back we were listening to Jersey Boys in the car and singing along to all the songs.
You guys remember Jersey Boys right? We caught it in Vegas and it’s to date my favourite musical of all time (overtaking Wicked).
Here’s a sneak peek on the songs we were singing along to.
It’s awesome.
The last part of my Saturday was actually spent in Zouk with my old uni friends. It was a last minute thing. I didn’t know I was going to go for that until like 2 hours before. I don’t have any pictures for that night in Zouk because well.. to be honest I ended up mixing whiskey and champagne and you know what happens when you do that.
I had an awesome Saturday and you know the funny thing was that I never saw it coming. I just thought it was going to be a regular Saturday that I had to spent in the office when I woke up in the morning. Sometimes as Forest Gump says, life really is a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re gonna get.
Life is full of pleasures. We just need to know how to find them.
Timothy Tiah – Co-Founder of Colony, Kuala Lumpur Co-Working Space