{"id":2165,"date":"2012-11-23T16:16:58","date_gmt":"2012-11-23T16:16:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/vwxynot\/?p=2165"},"modified":"2012-11-23T16:26:19","modified_gmt":"2012-11-23T16:26:19","slug":"retreat-to-the-library","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/vwxynot\/2012\/11\/23\/retreat-to-the-library\/","title":{"rendered":"Retreat to the library"},"content":{"rendered":"

(I’ve been back from Puerto Rico for a couple of weeks now, but for some reason I’d got it into my head that I had to write a “What I Did On My Vacation” post before I could write anything else, and I was having a hard time coming up with a creative non-chronological way to describe my wonderful holiday (all I’ve got so far is two genius\/terrible puns, depending on who you ask, and a tenuous song lyric tie-in). But then I realised that I’m not in primary school any more and can write whatever I want, in whatever order I want! Being a grownup is so great!1<\/sup>)<\/em><\/p>\n

My team at work had an all-day offsite retreat earlier this week. It was really great to have the whole group of 20+ people together for a whole day – we’re split over two sites, as are the department’s labs, offices and PIs – and we covered a good group of topics, with lots of interaction and creative ideas from everyone. During a drawing-based activity we even came up with a new team mascot – Bleb, the Super Project Manager! (Bleb wears a cape and is an amoeba, because a) PMs have to be very adaptable and b) amoebae are very easy to draw).<\/p>\n

The retreat was in a meeting room at the main downtown branch of the Vancouver Public Library<\/a>, because that’s how cool we<\/em> are. It’s a very interesting and attractive building, inspired by the Colosseum in Rome, with lots of light and space inside. I haven’t spent much time there before as I’ve always lived much closer to one or another of their satellite branches, so it was great to spend a whole day in the building, even though we didn’t get much time to explore. But I’ll be back more often now that I’ve remembered how nice it is!<\/p>\n

\"Vancouver<\/a><\/p>\n

[photo credit<\/a>]<\/p>\n

Being in a library all day was also a nice nostalgic flashback to my last couple of years of high school. It wasn’t generally a very happy time in my life, what with the bullying for being clever and all, but I did have a small group of close friends, and the library was one of our regular hangouts \/ refuges from the cruel outside world2<\/sup>. We were basically like six Hermione Grangers, if Hermione Granger was more timid and spent most of her clothing allowance at the Sweater Shop.\u00a0The librarian was a terrifying old battle axe3<\/sup> who’d transferred in from a rough inner city school somewhere down south, but gradually learned that not all students were evil book trashers4<\/sup> and learned to tolerate our presence.<\/p>\n

I observed two of my colleagues sniffing marker pens during the retreat, which may or may not have also been a flashback to high school5<\/sup>.<\/p>\n

The absolute highlight of a fun day, though, was the extraordinarily good timing of two of the announcements that came over the library tannoy system:<\/p>\n