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"I want Urs for my boat," engineer John Bauer punned when we were choosing canoe-trip buddies. "I can't row without him."

"Unfortunately the root is defunct now," Jeremy Chau nerdily joked about a tree that fell in the parking lot. "Should we take a look at the log?"

We held an employee contest to guess the first day we would do a hundred million searches, with the winner riding away on a new electric scooter. We had a spring-cleaning ice-cream social and a flood of geeky jokes. ("How many Microsoft engineers does it take to change a light bulb?" "None. They just declare Darkness™ the standard.")

When Karen took a vacation, we ordered a thousand plastic playground balls and filled her cube with them. They were still being thrown from office to office and rolling around under desks a year later.

For Mardi Gras, Charlie adorned the café with beads and cooked little plastic babies into king cakes. On Cinco de Mayo we tasted crawfish and sweet potato tamales washed down with horchata and sweet sangria.

For Halloween we had blood-clot punch with life-sized baby dolls floating in the bowl (Charlie had a fetish for food garnished with infants) and a parade of tasteless costumes including choirboys with sinner priests, bloodied plane-wreck casualties, and oozing shark-bite victims—and those were just the outfits worn by our not-so-politically-correct HR manager, Heather.

And we had groupies. Tourists in Linux t-shirts took souvenir photos under the Google sign by our front door—proof that Yahoo had put us on the map and that our brand was striking a chord deeper than that of a typical tech company.

It seemed I merely had to stand up and walk a few paces away from my chair in any direction to experience something new and entertaining.

"Cock rings? I overheard one sales rep ask another as I passed her cube. "How many of those do we have? And vibrators? How many can we come up with for that?"

"There must be a supply cabinet I don't know about," I thought. "Or perhaps I forgot to sign up for the mailing list about after-work parties."

Adult services advertisers, I learned when I asked, were among our earliest customers. They needed to know how many ad impressions we could deliver targeted to the words that defined their businesses. The sales reps had been checking the "inventory" of projected searches for those keywords. Google was not the place to work if you had delicate sensibilities.

The lighter moments helped make the load bearable, but it was the boldness of our business initiatives that really got my blood flowing and kept me from feeling trapped in a thankless grind. I never knew when some fastball would smack me in the head and reset my thinking yet again.

Say What You Will

"What the hell are you thinking?" I asked Larry when he explained his idea for a new do-it-yourself advertising system.

The engineers had continued to innovate on our initial CPM ad system, beginning with placing ads on the right-hand side of search results in addition to those at the top of the page. The next step, Larry informed us, would be a feature that made it possible for anyone to create right-hand-side ads and post them live on Google within minutes. We would have guidelines and terms and conditions, but we would start running ads before verifying they were in compliance. In effect, anyone with a valid credit card could make an ad that said anything.

Anyone. Anything.

"How in the world is our brand going to survive racist, pornographic, and defamatory ads?" I protested. "They're bound to show up on our results pages. Do we want our brand to be associated with hate speech and worse? I have a very bad feeling about this."

Larry's decision to let user-created ads go live on our site without review convinced me he occupied some alternative and severely distorted reality. To allow the publication of unscreened ads was a classic marketing crisis in the making. Any fool could see that. Evidently, I was that fool.

Others shared my incredulity. One