Authors: Douglas Edwards
Any illusion of work/life balance was sucked from beneath me like beach sand in the retreating tide preceding a tsunami. Kristen wasn't thrilled, but she understood I had to get "the startup thing" out of my system. She kept the kids fed, clothed, homework-compliant, and off the drugs.
To preserve some connection with my offspring, I'd take an hour on Fridays to volunteer in their classes at school. No one at Google had a problem with that because, in theory, I had near autonomy over my schedule.
"As long as you get your work done," Cindy reminded me. Since the work was never ending and never defined from day to day, it was never "done." I did manage to keep most of my Saturdays after the CableFest relatively free, though that simply meant I hadn't planned to do any work until Sunday afternoon, when I'd need to gear up again for Monday. It wasn't unusual to get an urgent email or phone call that drew me back into productivity mode for an hour here or there on Saturday or Sunday morning.
"Do you want to go to Daddy's office?" I'd ask my tween-age sons when I had to go in to the Plex on weekends. The answer was always yes. The office was so much more fun than home, which was tragically sugar-free and devoid of video games, bouncy balls, and air hockey. I set them up with the Dreamcast game console in the conference room and carefully wrote my phone extension in big block numbers on a whiteboard. They didn't seem to mind loading paper cups with malt balls, M&Ms, and Twizzlers, then sitting in front of the screen slurping root beer, but I knew in my heart I should be outside with them throwing a ball or building something splintery out of plywood and two-by-fours. If nothing else, I was giving them a horribly warped view of what "going to work" actually meant.
I wasn't trying to impress the boss with my diligence. I was merely trying to keep up. Many of my overcaffeinated twenty-something colleagues had relocated from outside the Bay Area. They had no local friends, no attachments, no relatives, and often no TVs to distract them. They had Google.
On the off chance an employee might succumb to the allure of some idyllic "real life," Google encased us in a cocoon of essential service—son-site haircuts, on-site car washes, on-site dentist and doctor, free massages, free snacks, free lunch, free dinner, gaming groups, movie nights, wine and beer clubs, tech talks and lectures by globally recognized speakers. And everywhere you turned, intelligent companionship. If the city of Mountain View had not zoned our building nonresidential, many Googlers would have given up their apartments to establish a Plex Biosphere.
George Salah and the facilities team gave the lobby a makeover: two bright-red couches with fuzzy rounded edges on either side of a surfboard-shaped glass coffee table, a few large ferns, a mirror, and some lava lamps. They covered the elevator doors with primary-colored metallic rectangles, installed a cooler for Naked juice drinks, and hung a neon version of the Google logo in the stairway like the welcoming sign of an all-night diner. Googlers draped themselves over the couches to read the paper or bounced on balls while knocking back Mighty Mangos and chatting with the receptionist. It was our communal living room and our airlock to the outside world.
It wasn't always treated with respect. An engineer eventually broke the glowing neon Google sign while trying to see if he could kick a three-foot rubber ball all the way to the second floor from the lobby. "Why didn't they have a note on it saying, 'Don't kick balls around this'?" he groused afterwards.
Sergey decided we needed a piano to add a touch of class to the lobby and instructed George to buy a disklavier that could play by itself when staffers weren't around to tickle its keys.
One night around two a.m., I heard the piano suddenly start playing at high volume. Going downstairs from my office to shut it off, I saw Salar sitting at the keyboard in the half-light, ripping through a Chopin scherzo and filling the small space with his frenetic finger work. I stood and watched as he flawlessly hammered out notes, the sound crashing against the walls, the windows, the furniture, as if it needed to break free and soar across the moonlit wetlands just outside our door. The piece felt familiar to me. Then I realized that it wasn't the melody but the tempo—the mad racing pace, the unrelenting forward momentum—that I knew all too well. It felt like Google chasing opportunity through the night.
"Come in," said Babette. She was sitting at her computer looking at her calendar. "Take off as much clothing as you're comfortable with and lie face down." She stood up and stepped toward the door. "I'll be right back."
The office door with the sign "Googlers massaged here" looked like any other in the Plex, but it was the only one behind which it was officially okay to be naked. (Google's official office dress code was "You must wear clothes.") On one wall was a large print of
Squares with Concentric Circles
by Kandinsky. On another was an anatomical chart of the human muscle system. The large window overlooking the industrial park was draped with a beige sheet. Protean organic shapes swam languorously inside a yellow lava lamp glowing from the floor.
I'd never been naked in an office before. It felt weird, as if I were exposing a part of me that didn't belong to the company and inviting them to lay their hands on it. Just another case of Google breaking down the wall between my life at work and my sense of my private self.
*
Yet the massages were one of the best parts of working at the company. Google's high energy and even higher expectations lent my bottled-up stress its own unique flavor, and the supply never seemed to run dry. Massage was the best way to relieve my knotted shoulders and knitted brow and to reduce the torque spinning my teeth against each other like millstones as I slept.
Larry and Sergey had bestowed upon us Bonnie Dawson and Babette Villasenor to smooth the kinks in necks craned over monitors and the aches in fingers that clawed at computer keys like Gollum scrabbling for the ring of Sauron. Not that the founders possessed special immunity to tension. Their names could often be found filling the boxes of the online massage schedule, and it was prudent to check carefully before calling a meeting you expected them to attend, lest you be preempted by their need to be kneaded.
Larry once blew off a meeting I had scheduled weeks before because a massage slot suddenly opened up. "You understand, don't you?" he asked apologetically. Actually, I did.
The free massages didn't last long. Demand quickly exceeded supply, even when the company started charging a nominal amount. To manage the backlog, limits were placed on how far in advance massages could be booked, and the appointment calendar was opened at random times to ensure that day and night workers had equal access. Automated Japanese massage chairs installed in the lobby did nothing to prevent the development of a gray market for massage coupons. In Google's shadow economy, the certificates—originally offered as tokens of appreciation or awards for extraordinary work—were repurposed as bribes for equipment or technical services or even drink tickets at company parties.
If the massage table wasn't available to depress beta-wave activity, there was always the blue room.
"I think we're at an impasse," I told Salar when we butted heads on a branding issue neither of us would concede. "I'll meet you in the blue room in fifteen minutes to decide this once and for all." When he showed up, I handed him a Dreamcast controller, took one for myself, and loaded the
Soul Calibur
disc. For the next ten minutes we battled onscreen as two mythic warriors intent only on the other's destruction. I handily put him in his place, proving the superiority of my marketing sensibility and my manual dexterity. To his credit, Salar recovered from the crushing defeat, racking up a number of accomplishments at Google only slightly less impressive than the slide kick I used to knock him out of the ring in game three.
Ben Smith,
*
Ray Sidney, Bogdan Cocosel, and John Bauer also had the skill to kill and swaggered and swore and vowed vengeance when forced by crashing servers to abandon play just because Google was in a tailspin somewhere.
"We're down? Where? The East Coast? All right, just a minute, it's four a.m. there. No one will notice while I finish this round."
The games became so rowdy that play was forbidden during daylight hours, giving rise to email challenges that flew all through the night, often consisting of no more than the simple subject line "My soul still burns."
"No thanks," I told Charlie Ayers. "I don't eat that."
"That's because your mama never made them like this," Charlie replied, leaning across the steaming trays with the grinning confidence of a used-car salesman. "Most people overcook lima beans until they're gray and mealy. You have to serve them fresh and green."
"Um. Okay," I said, putting five lima beans on my plate.
"And try this," Charlie said, sweeping his hand over a tray overloaded with gold-encrusted chicken parts as if it were a cherry Thunderbird driven only by a Baptist widow to Sunday prayer meetings. "You know where I got the recipe for this? I got this recipe from Elvis Presley's personal chef. This is the exact same Southern-fried chicken the King and Colonel Tom Parker used to eat. Tell me that's not the best damn chicken you ever tasted."
While I wrestled with where I fit in the company, Charlie Ayers had no doubt about where he belonged: in the kitchen. Charlie was the chef Larry and Sergey had hired the week I came onboard. He had immediately begun converting the downstairs dining area into a working café (he corrected anyone déclassé enough to call it a cafeteria). In his oft-voiced professional opinion, the facilities were deplorably inadequate for what he wanted to do: re-create the healthy organic menu he had served while catering for concert promoter Bill Graham Presents. While we eventually shorthanded Charlie's story to "former chef for the Grateful Dead," he always made it clear that the Dead had never hired him; he had just prepared meals for them on occasion. "It wasn't the stuff I was feeding him that killed him," Charlie protested when staffers made cracks about Jerry Garcia's heft and untimely demise.
With sixty-plus Googlers to feed—most of them young with the caloric intake of orcas—Charlie sweated through daily lunch and dinner with only sous chef Jim Glass and a couple of kitchen staffers to help prep and clean up.
"Goddamn the oven," Charlie could be heard to mutter. "Goddamn the refrigerator. Goddamn the dishwasher." The catechism continued, embracing the serving line, the layout of the room, the sinks, the suppliers, and his skinflint bosses, Larry and Sergey. Charlie cursed the uncaring employees—fresh from college food services—who took more than they could eat or brought guests in unannounced, nullifying his careful menu math. And through it all, he delivered one incredible meal after another.
Charlie made everything on the premises except for the bread, which was dropped off outside the kitchen each morning in gray bins marked bread only—not for garbage. He selected his ingredients with a bias toward organically grown produce from local farms, and he railed against processed foods like the creamy gelatin-filled yogurt I preferred to the lumpy organic style he insisted was healthier. Compared with the
Merc'
s Front Page Café, with its limp greens and greasy grilled cheese, Charlie presided over a gastronomical nirvana.
He'd tantalize us each morning with an email outlining his plans for ravishing our taste buds, an email that included a different menu every day, like this one:
Soups:
Cream of Asparagus, Savory Mushroom & Lentil
Salads:
Thai Noodle, Old-Fashioned Potato Salad, Carrot Dill, Organic Mixed Greens
Entrees:
Roasted Turkey Breast with Miso Turkey Gravy and Cornbread Stuffing, Braised Tofu & Eggplant over Brown Rice
*
Sides:
Candied Yams, Green Beans
Desserts:
Apple Pie, Blueberry Tarts, Cherry Pie, Creamy Rice Pudding
Once marketing moved downstairs to the cubicles adjacent to the café, I could see the lunch line begin to form shortly before noon. I always dropped whatever I was doing to be near the front.
"Wait for the bell!" Charlie spat at us if we pushed too far into the café before he was ready. If things weren't going well in the kitchen, it was dangerous to get too close.
"Watch out. Hot soup!" he'd yell, pushing through anyone blocking his access, giant steaming tureen held high. Charlie dashed about, paring knife in hand, madly slicing and dicing last-minute garnishes and loading the breadbaskets, his temper flaring like the gas burners under a fatty stir-fry. Only when everything was in its place would he ring the little hotel check-in bell on the counter signifying that it was safe to begin. The chain gang would shuffle past, serving itself salads and a main course before ambling toward the desserts and the drink cooler. Still, it was better to risk Charlie's wrath than to miss a favorite entrée or some special chocolate confection whipped up in limited quantities. Ops—ever optimizing performance—installed a webcam over the door for a live feed of kitchen conditions, line length, and the intensity of Charlie's agitation.
The six-foot folding tables at which we sat were straight from an office supply store and surrounded by the cheap metal chairs they bring out for overflow crowds at church services and funerals. The implicit protocol was to take the first available seat next to whatever engineer or salesperson or facilities staffer happened to be the last one seated, and then engage them in conversation. Sometimes the resulting dialogues were peppered with German or Chinese or with the equally incomprehensible acronym-laced geek-speak. I feasted on critiques of competitors' releases and detailed descriptions of the esoteric elements of GWS, accompanied by diagrams inked out on paper napkins. I asked naive questions and got sophisticated answers about our technology and our industry, a process that was part of Larry and Sergey's calculus behind offering employees free food in the first place.