Notes from the googleplex

You certainly don’t expect to be greeted by people in swimming caps and bathing suits when you pull into the parking lot of a high-tech company, especially not when it’s raining outside. With Google, however, we should know by now to expect nothing but the unexpected. Intrigued by exactly such a welcome, I take a few more steps from the parking lot towards the visitor’s lobby, and as I begin to trace the origin of the scantly-clad engineers things begin to make sense to me. In the middle of the campus there is a Jacuzzi, and around it sit engineers with their laptops, not disturbed by the drizzle that is so atypical to April mornings in Silicon Valley. In the Jacuzzi several talking heads are having a conversation. I get it. The Jacuzzi must be a way for people to relax from the ball game that they can play in the large, sandy beach-volleyball court that dominates the otherwise Photoshop-green lawn at the center of the universe, sorry, center of the Googleplex.
I walk into the fancy glass-walled lobby, eying the employee cafeteria that serves –not sells-- all sorts of nuts and other health foodstuffs. Within the lobby, four Lava-lamps adorn the reception counter in lieu of old-world flowers, comfy red couches occupy this modernist space, and the guests are welcome to enjoy a slew of expensive health juices. Updated magazines are spread on the coffee tables, and a massage chair is there to entertain you if your host is delayed. Where one would expect to find the receptionist there is a computer with a large screen greeting me with googlesque and instructing me to self-print my visitor’s badge. “I Agree”, then sign the waiver form with an electronic pen and the machine prints my sticker-badge while I’m noticing a basketball size ball made of the remnants of the sticky badges of previous visitors gone-by. Automation –the next generation, I think. Where are the humans here, I wonder?
A semi-transparent back-projection screen is hung high from the ceiling, with terms scrolling bottom to top in rapid succession. A combination of familiar celebrity names, long technical terms, words in undecipherable east-Asian languages, and long strings of letters and numbers that run on the screen hypnotize me.
“What is this all about”, I ask a woman that finally walks in and takes the receptionist seat,
“These are search queries in real time,” she answers briskly.
I feel like one of Jules Verne’s characters having reached the center of the earth. This is the real thing, I think. This is as close one can ever get to seeing Gaia, the spirit of the organism we call earth.
My next thought is that this must be a very nice place to work in. The oldest person I see coming in or out of the building is not more that 40 years old. Then I look at the clock on the wall and change my mind. The clock is an hour late.
“Your clock is an hour late” I tell the receptionist in a friendly tone “You know they moved to daylight saving time today, the spring is starting”. It’s actually hard to believe that it is spring already. This year was the rainiest in the bay area since 1904, the year they started to keep meteorological records.
“I know it is late” she replies
“So aren’t you going to change the time then?” I insist.
“No, I don’t do that, Information Systems have to do that, the clock is centrally controlled”
I look at the wall again and find it hard to believe. The timepiece looks like any other black-and-white clock I know, just like the one present in every classroom in America, maybe a little cleaner and more-expensive looking. But what really catches my eye is not the centrally controlled watch but the minute other details of central control. Beneath the clock there is a picture of the two founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, one of them with his arm on the other’s shoulder, and the CEO Eric Schmidt standing in the background. Google is turning into a big company, I realize. The Jacuzzi and beach-volleyball court are its failed attempts to stay young. Like any 35 year-old woman would tell you, it’s not going to work.
As my host comes to pick my up from the lobby, I realize I could never work for a big company, no matter how young it looks.