Lately I've hinted -- not very subtly -- that I'm now working for Google. I'm technically not a Google employee, but I'm working onsite at the Google headquarters on some internal projects for them. I didn't want to say too much at first because I wasn't sure how much I could tell you without getting in trouble. In fact, now that I think about it, I'm tempting fate with this post, as I was once fired from a job over an email that I sent the day before the Thanksgiving weekend. I won't go into detail on that now, but let's just say that I came into work the next Monday and couldn't log in to my computer. Some people just don't appreciate the fact that I'm the World's Foremost Authority on Sarcasm.
Presumably, though, Google knows this about me, as they are the ones who gave me the title. If you look up "sarcasm" on Google, you'll see my picture. Well, ok, not
my picture, but a picture I made. Seriously. Go to
Google Image Search and type in "sarcasm." The number one result is a fake motivational poster that I made. Pretty cool, huh?
Google did a background check on me before they hired me, and I have to assume that the background check included, well, Googling me. You can find out just about every interesting thing about me by looking at the first page of results on Google: I'm a software developer, the author of
Antisocial Commentary, the mastermind behind MattressPolice.com and
Humor-Blogs.com, the treasurer of my church, and a finalist in the 2006 Wildfowl Carving Competition, Division F (Decorative Lifesize Wildfowl).
Er, that last one might be someone else with the same name. I don't recall carving any wildfowl in 2006, although in 1991 I did sculpt an uncanny ceramic replica of my college roommate watching TV. See? His name is George.
Anyway, I'll avoid saying anything bad about Google while using Google's blogging platform to talk about working at Google. I'm smart that way.
To be honest, I have nothing bad to say at this point. Working at Google is surreal. First of all, the campus is HUGE. I have a terrible sense of direction, which has resulted in me wasting about a day and a half over the past few weeks looking for my car. You wouldn't think that a company whose flagship product is an empty web page with a textbox in it would need fifteen buildings and ten thousand employees, but I guess someone has to run and fetch all those search results. ("Yes sir, I think we have 'donkey sex.' Let me just run over to the Donkey-Donut building a minute.")
It's like a small city, except that the city is populated by the people that you used to make fun of in high school. (I can say that because I'm one of those people, so suck it.) And now they're running the world and getting paid very well for it. When the movers and shakers are in Northern California, they don't go to Sacramento, they go to Mountain View. Last week Barack Obama was there. The week before that, Tony Bennett and the guy who run the human genome project swung by (not together, but wouldn't you love to be a roadie on that tour?). And then there was that little surprise show by a band you may have heard of called Matchbox 20. And that's just since I started working there, in October. The campus is just down the street from Shoreline Amphitheater, and there's some question as to which venue has better concerts.
There are 16 gourmet restaurants on campus, and they're all free. That's right, if you work there (or even if you're a contractor like me), you can eat lunch and dinner for free. There's a hardware depot in every building where you can pick up an ergonomic keyboard if the standard issue one you have isn't cutting it. Oh, and maybe a new mouse. And a mouse pad. And a webcam. And some noise-canceling headphones. And a remote control. And a paddle game. And this chair. And that's
all I need.
It's like working at one of those dot com companies in 1999, before everything went to hell. Massage chairs, a dry-cleaning dropoff, lounges with arcade games and fridges stocked full of soda... It's like heaven with cubicles. I know, it doesn't sound right, but now you're getting an idea of how weird it is.
I could go on, but I've probably said too much already. I should probably try to avoid upsetting the bigwigs -- at least until they've gotten to know me a little better. I mean, for all I know they don't realize that I'm also the World's Foremost Authority on "Harry Potter Satanism" and "Crack Whore Barbie."
Humor-blogs.com is located in the Hummus-Humus Building.
Labels: Doctored Photos, Work