Gangnam Style

That time of year has  come around again - the annual "Pimp Your Pod" competition. Last year we took the prize with our famous Beery Christmas beer tree. Since then, our team has divided - Nelish is now leading the Portfolio Reporting team, whilst I work for Brent in the Portfolio Analytics team. So this year, we decided to pimp our pod...

Gangnam style!

We obtained some pictures of Psy from the internet (you may have heard of it) and decorated our pod accordingly:

We faced stiff competition from the Risk Information team, who had put together a decoration based on the transition of National Bank into ANZ, which has been a big thing here in New Zealand over the past two years. For those of you who don't know, ANZ bought the National Bank from Lloyds in 2003. They have now decided to merge the two banks under one brand, the ANZ brand. This has caused wailing and gnashing of teeth, mostly by a media-induced hype of "foreign ownership" which conveniently ignores the fact that (a) all the other big New Zealand banks are owned by Australian banks, (b) that National Bank was bought 9 years ago, and (c) Lloyds Bank, the previous owner, was also a foreign bank. Hey ho.

Some other teams also put up their decorations, including the Snoopy Christmas, and the Beach Bach Party;

All the rest went with a basic "Christmas" theme which we felt was a bit boring.

We also did the Gangnam Style dance to the song, to impress the judges, dressing (as close as we could) to Psy's Gangnam Style - this involved white shirts, bow ties, and black trousers. I'm not sure if this improved or worsened our score...particularly as Brent didn't seem to know the moves, and Shane only learnt them at lunchtime. Fortunately Cliff and myself were at the front, so hopefully covered up their bad dancing.

The judges went off into a huddle, and then came out with the result of their deliberations: we came second, winning $50, and the Risk Information team came first, winning $100.

On Thursday, we will have a "final of finals" between all the winners on all floors in Risk with the Chief Risk Officer as the final adjudicator. There is an as-yet unspecified prize for this also, so we may yet win...if our team members can improve their dancing skills!