Seattle Puzzle Hunt

Well, just returned from my first morale event since starting at Microsoft, with a Starbucks gift card and a nifty little Sherlock Holmes action figure to show for my team's winning efforts. (Ok, I couldn't resist a little bragging... :-)

We started off the afternoon with a (free!) pizza lunch, after which the entire mailbox team was carried off in ten stretch limos to flex our mental muscles as we raced around downtown Seattle solving clues. I think my favorite involved finding what the location of four books at the Seattle Central Library had in common. And yeah, that sounds like an easy enough puzzle when you're reading it, but this is one big library (some ten stories, not counting the administrative floor), so we sent a couple people to locate each book, then pooled our findings. We actually missed the answer they were looking for (all the books were in opposite corners) but our answer (the books were each on the end of the shelf) worked as well, so we got full points anyways (parenthesis are such fun!).

Altogether, it made for a most enjoyable afternoon, and it was really nice meeting some coworkers, as well as putting faces to some of the names I recognized from all the email flowing around here.