Engineers without Borders

Last weekend I competed on the Panasonic Engineers without Borders team! I was the last person asked to join, making up our team of 13 engineers. I'm one of the oldest people on the team! {sigh} When did I get OLD?!!! Anyway, here we are! Panasonic's Engineering team!

Engineering without Borders isn't so much an athletic event as it is a team work event. Our first event was a series of relay events which included a balloon toss, pass the water down the line to fill a bucket, and pass a hula hoop down the line and back again... We also had: putting...

A walk the plank to the end of the field and back:

In this one we were supposed to find little foam blocks in a bin of packing foam, without knocking any foam outside the bin (points deducted if we get any foam on the ground). It's not as easy as it sounds!

Our two basket ball players were enlisted to throw the balls into the bucket... they didn't say we couldn't use a couple of our BIG guys as a backstop, lol! Riding on the edge of the rules kind of set the tone for our team, which you will see later...

In this one we had to get everyone to fit on one a small square. More points were given for the smallest squares.

We got a little messed up because we couldn't use the same people in each event (they should have told us that before!) Miriam and I were supposed to run the maze, but we had just done the plank walk. We had a bit of confusion as we tried to figure out who could take our places in the maze. As a result, we lost the relay event.

And here is my dodge ball debut! We had to field three teams. I was in the first team. I didn't know that dodge ball had so many RULES! I'm so proud that I wasn't the first one out... I was the second.... A ball that I threw was caught by the other team, so I was out. My team lost. Our second team fielded won. And our third team lost. So overall, we lost...


Then there is the infamous ropes course! 8 people go up the ropes course and race to the end. The rest of us are on the ground building as tall a structure as we can before the ropes people finish the course. Points are award for the first team finishing the ropes, and for the tallest structure.

Here is the ropes course... I would have loved to go up there, but there was a height requirement.


So I was part of the ground crew (actually I spend more time taking pictures than building the structure). We were handed a gallon zip bag of popsicle sticks and paper clips. We were told that that was all we could use to build our structure. So, our interpretation was that we could use the bag too...

The plan... split the bag open, roll it up, and build on top of it. BRILLIANT! Well... The other teams complained, and we were disqualified.

We also had a tug of war 5 rounds of 12 people each side. Since we had 13 on our team, we had a tug off between all the women to see which one would sit out. Guess who lost? But I took a lot of great photos! Hahaha!

So overall, Panasonic came in 6th out of the 10 companies competing. Kind of a dismal finish for our team of runners, basketball players, and weight lifters.

It was still a FUN time! Here we are waiting for lunch after the competition was over... FIRST in line! At least we got first in something! LOL!