I’m not someone who is very compatible with water. I never go swimming, I intentionally moved to the middle of the Mojave Desert, and I even hate when there’s water vapor in the air (i.e., humidity). It’s probably no surprise then that, when I want to engage in some leisurely activities, I never go looking near water.
That changed today. Tempo’s main headquarters is on Naples Island in Long Beach (our address is public now because we consolidated into a single facility and it’s the official registered address of our corporation). We have our own dock that opens up into the Alamitos Bay and connects directly to the Pacific Ocean. Naturally, one of the staff activities we decided to do was to go on a boat ride.
I’ve only had one prior boat-related experience in my life, and it was when I was working with the Cary Police Department in Illinois to do a search of the Fox River to try and find the body of Wendy M. Kimura, a missing woman. Although I cannot provide further details due to confidentiality reasons, the Chicago Tribune ran a story about the search back in 2013. Here is a photograph I took on June 12, 2013 at 10:21 AM when we were preparing the search area; you can see the sonar boat doing a test run.
Back to the present day. We rented a boat, docked it next to our headquarters, loaded it up with food and supplies, climbed in, and set off into the water with our CEO reynad driving.
Usually when I get motion sickness, it hits me hard and I immediately get sick. I feel like I’m about to vomit, I start getting headaches, and I start yawning uncontrollably. But, for some reason, I experienced the onset of seasickness differently. Instead of hitting me all at once, I gradually got more and more sick.
This actually caused me to believe that I wasn’t actually that sick at all. Usually, my level of sickness reaches it peak within minutes, then it plateaus. Apparently, when I get seasick, that’s no longer the case—things just continuously get worse and worse until I feel like my skull is about to collapse.
When I felt like I couldn’t handle it anymore, I asked reynad to stop by the team house again to drop me off after we had completed a lap around Naples Island. I got out, immediately laid in bed, and began my very slow process of recovery.
After the guys wrapped up the boat trip, I later found out that we had gotten banned from renting a boat from that facility again.
Apparently, we were not permitted to dock the boat (I imagine due to liability reasons). The boat we rented had a maximum capacity of 8, but if you dock the boat, additional people can enter the boat without the boat rental facility’s knowledge. Boats are fairly strict about capacity limits; anything greater than 12 actually counts as a passenger ship and requires far stricter safety regulations than just an 8- or 12-person boat.
Well, guess what. We docked the boat.
How did the rental facility find out? We sent three employees to pick up the boat, and when they dropped it off, I guess they only went with two. One person was clearly missing. Our employee who returned the boat had to explain the situation. Instead of saying something along the lines of “we had an emergency and had to drop off the third person” (to be clear, that obviously wasn’t the case, but it’s definitely a believable story), he instead thought the best course of action was to say that the third person reached for a jellyfish in the water and fell overboard.
We got banned for docking the boat and lying to staff.
…
Anyway, here’s a picture of our Director of Post-Production filming our Influencer and Marketing Manager making an announcement video for one of his upcoming events.
Good thing they were far enough away from the water that there was no risk of falling in.