Rackspace Rookie Orientation

I have been meaning to write about Rackspace's Rookie Orientation for a while, especially since Stewart Smith already wrote about his experience.  My orientation happened in the London offices in early October, it is a 4 day session in which we learn about and indeed get a feel for the culture at Rackspace as well as meeting many people and finding out about their roles along the way.  Yes there were presentations, but they were all done in a fun way.

Before Rackspace I have been to two orientations:

The first back in 2001 (during 9/11) was for a very large UK company and it was a week of team building and training us immoral sales tactics and even some things which would break trading standards laws (needless to stay I didn't hang around in that company for long).

The second was after one company I worked for got bought out by another (not Sun-Oracle), all I can really remember from this was the CEO used to get stoned a lot and got jailed for a publication a long time ago.

So what can I take away from the Rackspace Orientation?

I met some great people, we had a good time, we even made a video (which I won't show).  I got a real feel for the Rackspace culture which is very much what I hoped for.  Yes there were presentations, but presentations with explosions, a chicken, top-hats, wrists tied up in rope and one guy dressed as a semi-naked superhero.  This is not your average orientation :)

During the week we were split into four teams and there were two prizes.  The first was for the team who got the most points, my team (Rack'n'Rollers, see photo) won that award.  There was also a prize called 'Natural Born Racker' which was voted for by everyone at the orientation.  I won that prize and would really like to thank everyone who voted for me :)

My team's photo, I'm the one in the green top.

I admit I spent a lot of the week thinking about the work I need to catch up on, but it was an 'awesome' week.