From the title you might think that we had something weird going on in our data center, but no. It's the holiday season and our team had a pre-holiday break pot luck and white elephant gift exchange in our control center this afternoon.
 
Everyone brought vitals with the menu ranging from the chili to cookies with everything in between. Beer, wine, and root beer were on hand to wash everything down. One of our former interns (now full time) finished the menu and added to the festivities with holiday colored jello shots (now there's some X-mas "spirit"). My favorite dish was a fancy and hearty cinnamon bread (put in a request for the receipe...I'll see if I can get it up here).
 
After an hour or so of eating and socializing, we started the white elephant gift exchange. While these types of things are not normally my cup of tea, this one was quite enjoyable with a few of the antics and comments coming close to that ever-present "line" (okay, some of it went right past the line without looking back, but I don't think anyone was offended). The gift I ended up with was the game "Twister" (remember that line I was talking about? Probably enough said about Twister, except, in my defense, the game is still shrink wrapped and nobody shot any video of the party...and I'll plead ignorance if called in for questioning).
 
You might think from the above commentary that all the groups across Microsoft routinely get together and have a good time socializing with each other. That's not the case. IMHO, it's only the best groups do this. The team at the EEC (which is now actually the Windows Server Customer Connection Team) while diverse in opinions, skills, likes and dislikes, etc. is the best TEAM that I've ever worked with. We all care about what others on our team are doing and are willing to help out each other. Other teams I've worked with have approached this, but in this team we even went so far as saying that "teamwork" is one of our three top values.
 
Any team will get together for free food and booze. But I think it's a fair barometer of the teams health to see how much socializing actually happens.
 
Over the past couple of years, I've given some thought as to why the EEC has been so successful with every single customer that comes to our lab. In a nutshell, I think that the major contributing factor is not the strength of the individuals that make up the team, but the strength of the team itself.
...of course, free beer doesn't hurt.