The Beast from the East; The Pest from the West; whichever way you look at it, the UK has been thoroughly battered by the snow over the last few weeks. Labman engineers, never knowingly beaten by a bit of weather, took the opportunity to temporarily expand our HQ with an igloo, as well as sledging down any available slope.
Our countryside HQ, nestled in green hills on the outskirts of the North Yorkshire Moors, is no stranger to some bad weather, but non-stop snow for 5 days played havoc with the traffic. Still, those that made it into the office through the snow drift and the dodgems, set-to to make the most of the huge snowfall.
Snowball fights were inevitable, but putting their engineering knowhow to the test, Labman’s engineers were soon constructing their own sledges using offcuts, spare rope, and whatever else they could lay their hands on. Several staff piled into Land Rovers at lunch time for a trek up the famous Roseberry Topping to try out their new sledges, whilst others joined the production-line required to build the igloo.
There was no shortage of snow to fill empty project boxes used to construct the bricks; the job of compacting the snow was allocated to some; whilst others carried these blocks to an assembly area. Several members of Labman are igloo veterans, having spent a bracing night in Scotland in 2016 constructing an igloo, whilst others are twice veterans, being a part of the ill-fated trip of 2013, however, none of their advice was sought on this occasion. Despite this a fire was soon crackling within the winter shelter, and much patting on the back occurred - Labman are currently investigating technologies for automating the process of building igloos to reduce frozen fingers and to increase throughput of bricks.