rockholm

Here's something you American readers will find unbelievable, but that at the same time doesn't seem to faze the Icelanders: the company is flying every Icelandic employee (and American tagalongs, too) to Stockholm, Sweden for a weekend of team-building, dinner-eating, and campfire songs. That's around 25 people boarding a bus together at 5 a.m. on a Friday morning, riding to the airport, checking in, and taking up a chunky block of seats on the Icelandair morning KEF-ARN run. Then staying Friday night on an island in the Stockholm archipelago with our Swedish counterparts and Saturday night in a phat downtown hotel in Stockholm. We return on Sunday night, after the inevitable Icelandic suitcase-busting shopping trips and/or trips to the Stockholm in-city amusement park and/or lots of ice-cream-cone consumption. (Swedes eat ice cream on an almost continual basis throughout the day; it seems to be like a source of fuel to them.)

Kinda cool, I think. I never worked for an American company that would do this sort of thing, even when I consulted for one of the richest, even at the successful conclusion of a hellish 2.5-year project, even when the number of people to be flown somewhere was 5, even when the flight was a $200 Boston to New York shuttle ... to provide a purely hypothetical example. Here though, people are acting as though it's normal. Icelanders: I say this a lot in person to you and now I'll make it official on the IR: you don't know how good you have it.