I'm Feeling Lucky_ The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59 - Douglas Edwards [188]
The next morning I drafted a note demanding that Larry weigh in once and for all about who controlled the copy on Google.com. He had already assured me privately that wording was my responsibility, but now I wanted it in writing and on the record. Cindy advised me not to send the note. I let her cooler head prevail. I don't know if Cindy said something to Larry, but after that things settled down.
Marissa and I still disagreed over wording on occasion, but, at least in the short term, we found ways to work out differences amicably. Maybe Marissa realized she had finally overstepped her bounds. Maybe I was adjusting to Google's new world order in which product management had a legitimate say in the brand messaging. Or more likely, keeping up with the overflowing load of projects kept us both too busy to waste energy debating passive vs. active voice and verb-subject agreement. By late 2003 I was getting more done, faster and more efficiently, than I had in any other job I'd ever held.
In Redmond, the Beast Awakes
One of my new responsibilities was running our weekly TGIF meetings. We had passed a thousand employees in April 2003 and our Friday get-togethers were now enormous gatherings held in a large open space on the first floor of the building next to the Saladoplex. Each Friday, a contractor named Michael "MLo" Lopez* helped me build an Apple Keynote presentation introducing just-hired Nooglers, highlighting department success stories, and providing insight into our financial health.
Larry and Sergey would barely glance at the script I gave them, then ad lib a comically surreal amble through the events of the previous week. "I can't really read this," Sergey might say, squinting at the revenue number on one of Omid's spreadsheet slides. "But you can tell it's big because it has a lot of pixels." I got my jollies by including horrible puns, juvenile animations, and absurd images in the slides projected behind them, which caused groans and laughs while they spoke.
Because information tended to trickle in throughout the afternoon from around the company, preparation took an entire day—my twenty-percent time. I did my best to keep the TGIFs entertaining, playing world music as people assembled to munch on snacks provided by Chef Charlie and giving Nooglers propeller beanie caps so they stood out in the post-presentation mingling. Some weeks we had skits, such as the interpretive dance, caped superhero, and flaming laptop that introduced changes to our Help Desk organization.
Fewer and fewer old-timers showed up. The engineers already knew what they needed to know and found TGIF a waste of time. The ratio of news to fluff was not sufficiently high to draw them in, which alarmed Larry and Sergey. TGIF was intended to bind the company together. Instead, the culture was separating like the layers in one of Charlie's parfaits.
The founders weren't above bribing senior engineers to attend. Each December, Larry and Sergey "surprised" the staff by handing out a year-end thousand-dollar cash bonus at TGIF. Three days before the 2003 distribution was to take place, they asked me for ideas about how to do the presentation. I suggested a casting tape for a (fictional) Superbowl TV spot. Given how often we derided the profligacy of dot-com companies and their mass-market advertising, few staffers would fall for it, but it would give us a framework.
I drafted a script and gave it to Delicia Heywood, a marketing staffer, to shoot and produce. She came back forty-eight hours later with the tape we would use the following day. After a brief intro of scrolling text, we cut to a director's slate. Then Al Gore,