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By Root 2018 0

passed by ten o'clock, when the drip of incoming email turned into a raging torrent and the daily meetings began. I shuffled from talks about new search features to UI discussions to product-roadmap updates. Google's clock ran on tech-company hours, which began no earlier than ten a.m. and ended when the following dawn poked the engineers in the eyes with rosy red fingers. At seven or eight in the evening, I drove home to tuck the kids into bed before logging in remotely to write copy and put out any fires that had started in the hour I'd been offline.

Any illusion of work/life balance was sucked from beneath me like beach sand in the retreating tide preceding a tsunami. Kristen wasn't thrilled, but she understood I had to get "the startup thing" out of my system. She kept the kids fed, clothed, homework-compliant, and off the drugs.

To preserve some connection with my offspring, I'd take an hour on Fridays to volunteer in their classes at school. No one at Google had a problem with that because, in theory, I had near autonomy over my schedule.

"As long as you get your work done," Cindy reminded me. Since the work was never ending and never defined from day to day, it was never "done." I did manage to keep most of my Saturdays after the CableFest relatively free, though that simply meant I hadn't planned to do any work until Sunday afternoon, when I'd need to gear up again for Monday. It wasn't unusual to get an urgent email or phone call that drew me back into productivity mode for an hour here or there on Saturday or Sunday morning.

"Do you want to go to Daddy's office?" I'd ask my tween-age sons when I had to go in to the Plex on weekends. The answer was always yes. The office was so much more fun than home, which was tragically sugar-free and devoid of video games, bouncy balls, and air hockey. I set them up with the Dreamcast game console in the conference room and carefully wrote my phone extension in big block numbers on a whiteboard. They didn't seem to mind loading paper cups with malt balls, M&Ms, and Twizzlers, then sitting in front of the screen slurping root beer, but I knew in my heart I should be outside with them throwing a ball or building something splintery out of plywood and two-by-fours. If nothing else, I was giving them a horribly warped view of what "going to work" actually meant.

I wasn't trying to impress the boss with my diligence. I was merely trying to keep up. Many of my overcaffeinated twenty-something colleagues had relocated from outside the Bay Area. They had no local friends, no attachments, no relatives, and often no TVs to distract them. They had Google.

On the off chance an employee might succumb to the allure of some idyllic "real life," Google encased us in a cocoon of essential service—son-site haircuts, on-site car washes, on-site dentist and doctor, free massages, free snacks, free lunch, free dinner, gaming groups, movie nights, wine and beer clubs, tech talks and lectures by globally recognized speakers. And everywhere you turned, intelligent companionship. If the city of Mountain View had not zoned our building nonresidential, many Googlers would have given up their apartments to establish a Plex Biosphere.

George Salah and the facilities team gave the lobby a makeover: two bright-red couches with fuzzy rounded edges on either side of a surfboard-shaped glass coffee table, a few large ferns, a mirror, and some lava lamps. They covered the elevator doors with primary-colored metallic rectangles, installed a cooler for Naked juice drinks, and hung a neon version of the Google logo in the stairway like the welcoming sign of an all-night diner. Googlers draped themselves over the couches to read the paper or bounced on balls while knocking back Mighty Mangos and chatting with the receptionist. It was our communal living room and our airlock to the outside world.

It wasn't always treated with respect. An engineer eventually broke the glowing neon Google sign while trying to see if he could kick a three-foot rubber ball all the way to the second floor from the lobby. "Why didn't