In the most recent team shuffle at work, a set of seven development teams were spawned, following the naming convention X It. For example, there’s Pay It, Sell It and Ship It. The team I was assigned to supports my colleagues on the Customer Service department and was therefore named Care It. However, the team quickly received the unofficial name of Team Carrot, due to the similarity in the way they sound.

At first, I found it kind of a dumb name, but, as nicknames tend to do, it grew on me. This then went the opposite direction, leading to our team adding carrots to pretty much everything.

Now, for our internal direct communication, our company uses Slack. For those who don’t know Slack, I’ve heard it’s pretty similar to Discord, though I haven’t used Discord to compare functionality. Anyway, one of the fun features of Slack is the ability to very easily add custom emoticons, including animated GIFs.

Last week, one of my colleagues found The Cult of the Party Parrot, and added a whole bunch of those parrots to our Slack. I couldn’t resist converting the parrot into a carrot, so I used my morning off to fiddle around and edit the GIF.

It’s not the greatest GIF around, but I do have some ideas on how I could have done it differently, so I guess I learned something, which is what I Never is really about. I don’t know if I’ll ever be in a situation where I can apply this new knowledge, but it was fun nevertheless!