[VALLEYWAG]
What happens when Google swallows your life? A new hire at the internet company is blogging the experience, from waking in his Google apartment to taking a Google car to Google dinner and then Googling home via Google.
A Sun veteran, software developer Tim Bray was no stranger to big-company life. But he knew Google enveloped employees on a whole other level, so after his recent hiring he vowed to blog his Google experience “while my eyes remain fresh.” Bray’s writeup was friendly enough, but commenters couldn’t resist comparing the Googleplex to the totalitarian systems depicted in the movie THX 1138, the book Brave New World and, most fashionably, in the TV show Lost, which features a crypto-military research project that calls itself “the Dharma Initiative.”
And no wonder: Google swaddled Bray from dusk til dawn:
• Bray wakes up in his nondescript Google apartment in Mountain View, where he rooms with “a taciturn Czech” who is comically unwilling to discuss his “data security” work. The lodgings are, presumably, temporary quarters.
• Bray rides the Google Bus, enjoying Google Wi-Fi on his way to work, at Google.
• Breakfast is at a Google café: “I lean to the Google bacon, fresh fruit, a little wee scoop of hash browns, and Google coffee, which is perfectly OK.”
• A buddy shows Bray an “out of the way” sushi joint… at Google. Sigh. At least it’s “across a couple of Google parking lots which I’ll never find again. It was good. They’re all good.”
• 6:30 rolls around, so it’s time for dinner, taken with some office-mates on a picnic table outside a Google café. Bray breathes life into his surrounding by carefully taking note of the “slanting California sun” and “knifing California breezes.” Ya, that’ll get old. — RYAN TATE, VALLEYWAG.GAWKER.COM
COMMENT: A “little wee scoop of hash browns” is Mountain View-speak for the illicit drugs which keep Googlers down on the farm and coding. — GlasgowRose
COMMENT: I hear the Google bidet is like an angel’s kiss. —onebadclam
COMMENT: This sounds fine. I have a feeling 2 hours inside Wal-Mart HQ would have me scared shitless. — oh no I di’n’t
COMMENT: Sure, it all looks happy and colourful now, but it won’t in the dystopian future. Think about your children people! Wait. I don’t intend to have any. /emails his resumé to Google. — breathless
COMMENT: The worst part is being awoke at 6AM by the Google bugle call. — MyNameIsChris