Beautiful Teams

Gentlemen, Start Your Rippers…

Ripping 10,000 CDs is a Herculean task in and of itself, but add the need to accurately enter all of the data from each album into a database—song names, year, artist names, etc.—and things start to get ridiculous. It comes out to around fifty CDs per person if everyone in our 200-person company contributed, but that assumes doing each CD only once and not having any data verification, which of course we wanted, so that put us up to over 100 CDs per person, if everyone contributes. But contribute they did. Michael announced during a Chairman's Chat one Friday that we needed everyone's help in getting this done, and lo and behold, I'm fairly certain that every employee took part: taking shifts to come down to the makeshift ripping area, using it as a break from their daily grind, and taking CDs back to their desk to work on them during downtime throughout the day. Even Michael took part in the process, although Robin Richards was out of town at the time and did not.

Over the next two weeks or so we slowly chewed through the CDs the company had purchased either from stores or from employees. It was a pretty tremendous sight to behold, and even more so it was a team-building process as you watched the office admin next to the VP of sales, the tiny on-staff masseuse, Linda, next to Paradise, one of the head musicologists as well as a founding father of hip hop. People were getting excited, and, while there was still grumbling about the legality of our situation, ...