Michael Seeger: “’Ceeeeee’ if you can guess where my ship is…”

This past weekend we enjoyed another annual Choice One Game Night. While there was no crowning of the Most Fun Spouse, project manager Michael Seeger was trying to be the Most Helpful Spouse by giving his wife Andrea some hints around what coordinates to guess next during our intense Battleship tournament.

Like Michael helping Andrea, we try to be a helpful bunch. For instance, the Battleship tournament champs—Shae Swick (administrative professional Abbey’s husband), surveyor Eric Kuck, and traffic engineer Mike Goettemoeller—trusted in helpfulness to win out. According to Mike G., the winning strategy was to “…rely on my teammates. Since Eric is a surveyor, he has a good understanding of boundaries and mapping things. Shae is a software engineer, so he is a very strategic thinker.” Smart!

Don’t sell yourself short, Mike G., we’re pretty sure your traffic safety skills helped your Battleship team in a roundabout way. And Michael Ceeeee-ger, don’t sweat your loss despite your helpful, hint-ful efforts. We know when it really matters, you’re clear about helping our clients and projects succeed (and blatantly obvious about helping coworkers stay grounded)!

Kristi Moorman: “Steve was using a jacket to ‘guide’ the bird. Specifically Daniel’s jacket… not his own.”

While days out on our survey crews sometimes get a little adventurous, most days in our Sidney and Loveland offices are pretty routine— wear green, design public and private infrastructure, discuss lunch, chat about sports, celebrate roundabouts, and so on. But this past Tuesday, a BIRD got into the Loveland office and excitement followed!

While we’ve had the occasional mouse in the office, this bird was a new experience. Not wanting any bird germs on his own coat, designer Steve Goessling grabbed Daniel Foos’s jacket to toss in the air to guide the bird out of the office. After much flailing and waving, the bird was successfully shooed out the front door. (All the while, project manager Troy Niese never missed a beat while on the phone determining a project schedule with a client…)

Despite working mostly with passive objects like concrete and plastic, we as engineers still have to expect the unexpected—sometimes that 80-year-old water main is wooden or brick! So whether it’s dealing with an old clay storm tile or an unexpected bird invasion, our adaptability is often put to the test. At least with an old pipe, it doesn’t land on a monitor to rest!

Inquiring Mindsets: “What is your all-time favorite Choice Mindset?”

We’ve written over 300 Choice Mindsets since October 7, 2011—which one is your favorite?

Nick Selhorst: “It’s not like dust flies up while I’m typing. It’s tucked in there.”

Thanks to our computer system at Choice One, we can easily visit either office and work from anyone’s desk. This is super handy, as we’re able to quickly log into a computer and get started in AutoCAD, Photoshop, or water/sewer modeling software in just a few minutes.

The catch, then, as engineer Becca McCready recently experienced, is that when you visit another’s desk, you also visit their habits. Nick Selhorst’s habit? Not dusting his keyboard. Cue Becca, pictured, and her slight discontent using Nick’s keyboard for a day. Despite joining Choice One only a few months ago, Becca embraced the Choice One way and made sure everyone was aware of Nick’s dusting deficiency with some good-natured ribbing. Exasperated, Nick lamented: “Is this keyboard joke going to flame out in a week, or be more like a “Kunk not buying donuts” thing and never go away?”

Nick, you know the answer. Choice One never forgets. Plus, now that your keyboard cleanliness has been carved into Choice Mindsets stone, we’ve ensured over a thousand readers outside of Choice One never forget, too. Besides, after all the “bonding” we enjoyed giving you a hard time, you said it best yourself: “My keyboard is the glue holding this place together.”

Nick Selhorst: “In the words of Yukon Cornelius, ‘You eat what you like, and I eat what I like.’”

Truer words have never been spoken at Choice One, especially about Skyline Chili. We have a fairly sharp divide between the “Skyline’s amazing!” crowd, and the “Skyline’s not amazing!” crowd (although stronger words than “amazing” are used by both sides…). And when Jeff Puthoff questioned Nick on his festive hat (and chili) choice this week, Nick used Yukon’s words to proudly defend the side of the Skyline fence he is on.

Nick’s nod to Yukon Cornelius harkens back to the 1964 stop-motion Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer program and a conversation between Hermey the future dentist elf and North Pole prospector Cornelius about peanut butter and pea soup. While the Skyline debate rages in the background of just about every lunch conversation at Choice One, we can be fairly sure there is little controversy in the peanut butter versus pea soup debate, just like there is little controversy that “doughnuts are good,” “pizza is good,” and “Brian Schmidt wants Arby’s.”

Like Yukon, Nick unapologetically embraces the 3-, 4-, and 5-way of tastes on the flavorful journey of boiled hot dogs topped with chili… because Choice One is serious about lunch, especially when it comes to anything topped with or relating to cheese. And like Yukon, we’ll stick to what we like, whether on Team Skyline or a Skyline Skeptic, because the winner of that debate at Choice One is as up in the air as Rudolph on Christmas Eve.

Adam Gill: “We smashed the previous diaper wrapping record… set by 5th graders.”

Nothing like a bunch of adults crushing some 10-and 11-year-olds to put everyone in the holiday spirit! While recently wrapping diapers at Sweet Cheeks Diaper Bank, the volunteers from Choice One (including Adam, far left) took it upon themselves to wrap a record number of diapers in a shift, a position previously held by a local 5^th grade class.

If you didn’t know, we at Choice One tend to make just about anything competitive—coney-eating, sledgehammer golf, or normal, everyday things like whose spouse is the coolest. We can’t help but see a record or goal and not want to blow it out of the water, even if that means we are coerced into buying lunch with our winnings or that winning means embarrassment rather than achievement.

In case you’re wondering, the 5^th graders’ record was around 23,000 diapers wrapped, and the Choice One crew wrapped around 31,000 in the same amount of time. While it shouldn’t be a surprise that our group of adults could beat a group of kids, we at Choice One know better: we have all been previously beaten by a two-year-old in an NCAA bracket pool, so we have to be on our game, working hard at any opportunity.

Here’s to another year of record-setting fun and fulfilling work at Choice One in 2024. Happy New Year!