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"Is it okay to go into the women's locker room to steal some towels?"

"Oh, sorry. Didn't realize anyone was napping in here."

"See, you knock down more garbage cans if you bounce the ball instead of just rolling it straight at them."

"It's in the area behind the coffee-can pyramid, right across from where the Big Wheel is usually parked."

"I tried to book ninety minutes, but the schedule was full. So I only got an hour. Could you focus on legs and feet? I think I pulled something running this morning."

Insecure in the Knowledge Your Contribution Matters

I needed to stretch. I'd been staring at my screen for two hours thinking up new banner ads, responding to users, and working on an "email-a-friend" program that Sergey thought had the potential to go viral.

"Your user name is not valid," I wrote for one of the program's error messages. "It may have a bad character. That's not a reflection on you." I was getting a little pixel punch-drunk and it was affecting my judgment.

I left my cubicle in the marketing pod and meandered off in search of glucose and caffeine. Google was growing. The company was still contained in a single building when the millennium began, but the offices lining the outer edges of the Googleplex had all been occupied.

One day a crew of Samoans, their thick biceps shrink-wrapped in coconut-leaf tattoos, arrived to fill the open space with cubicles. The area was now partitioned by a maze of cheaply acquired, mismatched fabric panels, the flotsam and jetsam of the dot-coms that had suddenly started sinking all around us. Fast-food toys, manipulative puzzles, empty soda cans, and geek-chic objets d'Nerf feathered the work nests. Ratty couches shambled through open areas and settled on brightly colored crop circles cut into the carpeting, offering lumpy, coffee-stained comfort and filling in for laundry hampers. I brought in a couple of four-foot-high inflatable dinosaurs and left them to graze on the new flooring.

Walking the gray-padded arroyos, I glimpsed many heads silhouetted by code-filled screens. It may sound deadly dull, but there was an energy to the place—conveyed in quiet conversations, snatches of laughter, the squeak of dry-erase markers on rolling whiteboards, exercise balls bouncing, and electric scooters humming down hallways.

Yoshka ambled past, ears flapping, collar jingling. Someone flopped on a couch, took off his skates, and dropped them on the floor. Someone ground coffee beans for an afternoon espresso. A pool cue slapped a cue ball. It passed the aggression on, smacking an eight ball loitering in its path and sending it into the deep funk of a faux leather pocket.

I sensed the tension of potential—building and bound only by time—like the feeling of crossing the tracks in front of an idling train. Great efforts were being made, and the energy they required rippled outward seeking physical release.

Sometimes that physical release took an intimate form behind closed doors with a willing partner.

We had a crash cot in a windowless nap room for those who had reached the edge of endurable fatigue and lurched beyond it. One afternoon a staffer peeked in and found two engineers on the bed, engaged in an act of noncomputational parallel processing. It was decided that the space—once sanitized—could be put to better use as an office. No punishments were administered, no stern policy reminders sent out. Those who might have cast stones couldn't find adequate purchase on the moral high ground, and so unofficial UI experimentation continued, just later at night and relocated to offices lit only by passion and the glow of multiple monitor screens. "Hormones were flying and not everyone remembered to lock their doors," recalls HR manager Heather Carnes.

Larry and Sergey encouraged everyone to channel their excess energy into roller hockey instead. Any employee who signed up was issued a free NHL jersey emblazoned with his or her name and Google's logo. Hockey provided yet another metric by which Googlers could be evaluated.

"There is