Synovate Fun Hunt

Day after day, it seems that I have fewer and fewer time for my blog. Today marks the day for Synovate Malaysia sports day. Well, it is not really the real sport after all, but this involved each and everyone going out of the office to do something.

For this year’s sport day, the Social Committee member has organized this treasure hunt, of what they called Synovate Fun Hunt. So today is the day where I can put my work aside for a day. And I don’t intend to talk about work with my team at all.

At first, I decided not to join, but my boss insisted that every single person from my department should join. And she asked me to bring my team along. On second thought, yes. This would be a good time to know the member of my team better through team building.

I arrived at office as early as 7:30 am today. By 8:30am, my team went to the 18th floor for registration, and to get these 3 car stickers – 2 to stick at left and right front door, and the other one to stick at the back bumper of the car.

Anyway, this event is organized by Time Out Solutions. I never know that there is such this kind of company out there. In the photo below, everybody gathered at the 18th floor to listen to the final briefing from the organizer.

And finally, all of us are flagged off my our Managing Director, Mr Steve Murphy.

The very next thing that we do is to stick the sticker to the car.

Anyway, this is the first time that my company organized treasure hunt. And almost all of us never took part in treasure hunt before, which make things really interesting. I myself don’t even know what are involved during treasure hunt until today.

For this Synovate Fun Hunt, the distance is approximately 120km, from KL to Port Dickson.

For those of you who never join treasure hunt (by car) before, I guess it would be interesting for me to share a little of what it is all about. Typically, treasure hunt contains of 4 elements

• 30 questions
• 1 challange
• 4 treasures
• Road safety questions

I go with road safety questions first. This one is just a typical question that you see about road safety, which is made compulsory by the ministry for treasure hunt.

The next one is 4 treasures to find, where you can get this along the way throughout your journey to final destination. The things that you need to find comes in a riddle, which you need to break the riddle to get what things that you need to get.

The challenge is an additional task that we need to perform to get extra marks. For today’s treasure hunt, we need to get

• A pair of high heels
• 2 wigs
• 2 eye patches
• Any 2 weapons – sword, shield etc

And the challenge is to act as jack sparrow and other pirates. I can’t stop laughing to see other teams came out with lots of funny ideas and acts.

You might wondering how to make everybody follow the same route, and no one got lost? Actually, the directions are given in the form of tulips. Below is how the tulips that we get looks like.

Basically this tulip starts at Sungai Besi Toll Plaza. How to read it? Let’s take tulip no 1. Upon reaching the toll plaza, you should trip zero (i.e reset the distance meter of your car to zero). The big dot is your car, and the arrow is the direction that you need to go. The fifth column denotes for how much distance that you need to travel before moving to the next tulip. Here, after travelling for 20.8km, you will see a junction to the left (i.e tulip no 2). So, we need to trip zero again here and travel for 1km for the next tulip (and so on).

Now let’s look at tulip no 5. On the forth column, there are 2 questions that needs to be answered. This is where the treasure hunt got pretty exiting. What I’m going to share next I found it very very very fun.

The questions that we need to solve are not really straight forward. It can come in the form of riddles, anagram, sound like, definition, hidden, look back etc and the topic can be anything – general knowledge, sports, local stuffs etc.

Let see what the very first question that we need to solve today. The question goes Microsoft’s operating system cleans out here. When we first got the question, we kinda guessing what the answer would be. But after we arrived at the sector where the Q1 and Q2 are, and after moving around the area looking at the signboard of the shops around there, the answer for Q1 is Vista Snow Wash

Hope you get that. Vista is Microsoft’s latest operating system, and snow wash is the place that has something to do with cleaning.

And for Q2, it goes like Slippery headgear for William one day? And the answer is

The reason behing this is – William is something to do with F1 – which is something to do with motor (i.e the word motor in the signboard), the headgear is the crown in this signboard, and the slippery is the lubricant word that is in the signboard.

It’s not that easy actually to break the clue of the question. The third question is the first question that my team got wrong. Q3 goes like Father surrounded by a rodent at this small market. What my team put for the answer is Pasar Mini Riski Pertama.

Our reasoning behind this is, when father goes to this market, there are rodents around, and it’s quite risky for father to go there.

But, the correct answer is Pasar Mini Rapat. Can you figure out why?

For father, we can call him PA. But PA is surrounded by rodent (RAT) at this small market. So, if we surround PA with RAT, we get RAPAT. And that’s why the answer is this.

There are 30 questions of this type, and below are some of which I managed to take the photo.

Q10. I hear an invitation to purchase at this shopping destination

When the question is about hear, this is a sound like kind of question. The work doesn’t necessarily the correct word, but it should sound like the correct work. When we say to purchase at this shopping destination, what we are saying is that we DO BUY at this shopping destination. The signboard that sound like DO BUY is this DUBAI CITY

Q11. On looking back, an exclamation of laziness by a local where you can have a meal.

Looking back in the question, so this is a look back type of question (reverse). We can have a meal here, so it has to be restaurant. For Laziness, the local would say MALAS LA. Look back (reverse), this should be AL-SALAM.

For the above question, I kinda pity my MD. His team are all whites (mat salleh). I don’t think they can figure out this one. Hehehe..

Q24. Serena’s sibling has a business here. Serena William? So her sibling is Venus William. Then the answer should be Venus Face Body Aromatherapy.

6 and 1/2 hours flying out so fast while we are searching for the answers for all the 30 questions, where we finally has to arrive at the final checkpoint at Guoman Hotel, Port Dickson by 4:30pm. 4:31pm marks the penalty time, where for every 5 minutes late, 1 point is deducted. And at 5:01pm, the team is disqualified is not yet returned to the final check point.

This is also the place where we need to pass all the treasures that we get along the journey.

The BBQ dinner awaits us after that, together with prize giving ceremony. There are 5 prizes alltogether, 2 consolation prizes of RM100 each, third place to get RM200, second place to get RM400 and first place to get RM600.

Even though my team didn’t win anything at the end of the event, but I think the more valuable thing that we get from this outing is the team building. I hope that they see I have a fun side too. And not to deny that I gain quite an insight of the personality of each and everyone of my team member.

If you want to know, I’m very serious work. I don’t do “no cincai – cincai work” ok. All the works that my team submitted to me, it has to be quality, and everything is checked to it’s finest detail. And I didn’t realize that I actually show this traits during the treasure hunt too.

There’s one question that goes To start and end with mother in the middle, offers a way to say hi by you and I. The answer that we first get is TOMATO GREETING. But after we left the spot, I then said “err.. greeting tu ada s ke tak (i.e greetings)”. You know what, everybody just lazy to go back to check and they write TOMATO GREETING, where the actual answer is TOMATE GREETINGS. For the judge, they won’t say “oh… you so close. never mind. we give you correct lah”. But what they will say is “no. your answer is wrong”. So we lose 3 points here. Sob Sob.

But anyhow, even though it’s a tiring 13 hours journey (flagged of by 10am, and reach back home at 11pm), but I was having so much fun today.