Snow in Troodos

Well, what happens because of this is that half of Cyprus is on Troodos! Nature had its solution for this overcrowding too. There were sections of the road to Troodos (which fall on the north side – behind the shade of the cliffs) which were almost impassable because of the frozen ice on the road. But, we had the usual bunch of smart and young Cypriot drivers with their girlfriends wanting to prove that their car could do anything and in the process providing entertainment to the onlookers as they skidded and got stuck in the snow.

Luckily, many of these treacherous stretches were between exits to the many mountain villages, so that you could always go into one of these exits and come out through another. We just wanted a place with fresh snow and lots of it. We didn’t attempt to take our car to the very top i.e. Mount Olympus. We stopped at the Troodos Square and went to place which was away from the maddening crowds. We then started making a snowman. Not the usual two lumps of snow on top of each other and then naming it a snowman. We wanted to make a designer snowman complete with all the accessories. It is not often that you get so much snow in Cyprus and you have a sunny day to go along.

Well, all of us were from the software industry and any activity we do is likely to be influenced by the good or bad practices we learn at work. Rather than just start digging out the snow, we planned that we would build a snowman in two layers, with one group working on the face/top and another on the body. I was in the group building the body. The initial “agreed” plan was to make a circular bottom, but because of implementation issues, it started to resemble a cylinder and finally Vidhya changing her requirements and asking us to convert it into a rectangular base. Since our implementation methodology was, at best, haphazard, it was very easy to adapt to the change in requirements!

Vidhya was in the group making the head of the snowman. Their plan was to make a circular head with a conical hat on top. I don’t know how they executed this plan, but when she presented the head, the hat was missing. Not only was the hat missing, the head looked like a big hat. Magically, the snowman’s head became conical in shape.

Next came the process of “accessorising” the snowman. We faced a problem which we hadn’t expected before. Well, if we start to expect problems, they won’t be a problem anymore, right. Since we hadn’t put a risk plan in place, the going started to become tough. This is where the tough guys came in. The ice/snow had hardened so much that we could not create sockets in the ice for the accessories like the eyes, nose and the mouth. So, we tried hard to push the eyes in and in the process almost beheading the snowman. This was where the innovativeness of the team shone. Since we could not make sockets for the mouth, we added lumps of snow at either end for the stick to stick. So, that is why you feel that the snowman has two lumps of gum in his mouth 🙂

Finally, it was time for the grand release party of the making of the snowman. It was production time, time to take the photographs and celebrate. Just before the first photograph was about to be taken, a critical defect appeared in the snowman and the whole system was about to crash. With the timely intervention of Gigo, the system was saved and the process of working on the first patch was started. We wanted it to be a small patch along with the main release, but it turned out to be such a huge fix, that we had to call it Service Pack 1.

So, after all the hardwork, there was fun to be had. Some photos of the release party are shown below .

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