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Sergey decided we needed a piano to add a touch of class to the lobby and instructed George to buy a disklavier that could play by itself when staffers weren't around to tickle its keys.

One night around two a.m., I heard the piano suddenly start playing at high volume. Going downstairs from my office to shut it off, I saw Salar sitting at the keyboard in the half-light, ripping through a Chopin scherzo and filling the small space with his frenetic finger work. I stood and watched as he flawlessly hammered out notes, the sound crashing against the walls, the windows, the furniture, as if it needed to break free and soar across the moonlit wetlands just outside our door. The piece felt familiar to me. Then I realized that it wasn't the melody but the tempo—the mad racing pace, the unrelenting forward momentum—that I knew all too well. It felt like Google chasing opportunity through the night.

De-Stressing Developments

"Come in," said Babette. She was sitting at her computer looking at her calendar. "Take off as much clothing as you're comfortable with and lie face down." She stood up and stepped toward the door. "I'll be right back."

The office door with the sign "Googlers massaged here" looked like any other in the Plex, but it was the only one behind which it was officially okay to be naked. (Google's official office dress code was "You must wear clothes.") On one wall was a large print of Squares with Concentric Circles by Kandinsky. On another was an anatomical chart of the human muscle system. The large window overlooking the industrial park was draped with a beige sheet. Protean organic shapes swam languorously inside a yellow lava lamp glowing from the floor.

I'd never been naked in an office before. It felt weird, as if I were exposing a part of me that didn't belong to the company and inviting them to lay their hands on it. Just another case of Google breaking down the wall between my life at work and my sense of my private self.* Yet the massages were one of the best parts of working at the company. Google's high energy and even higher expectations lent my bottled-up stress its own unique flavor, and the supply never seemed to run dry. Massage was the best way to relieve my knotted shoulders and knitted brow and to reduce the torque spinning my teeth against each other like millstones as I slept.

Larry and Sergey had bestowed upon us Bonnie Dawson and Babette Villasenor to smooth the kinks in necks craned over monitors and the aches in fingers that clawed at computer keys like Gollum scrabbling for the ring of Sauron. Not that the founders possessed special immunity to tension. Their names could often be found filling the boxes of the online massage schedule, and it was prudent to check carefully before calling a meeting you expected them to attend, lest you be preempted by their need to be kneaded.

Larry once blew off a meeting I had scheduled weeks before because a massage slot suddenly opened up. "You understand, don't you?" he asked apologetically. Actually, I did.

The free massages didn't last long. Demand quickly exceeded supply, even when the company started charging a nominal amount. To manage the backlog, limits were placed on how far in advance massages could be booked, and the appointment calendar was opened at random times to ensure that day and night workers had equal access. Automated Japanese massage chairs installed in the lobby did nothing to prevent the development of a gray market for massage coupons. In Google's shadow economy, the certificates—originally offered as tokens of appreciation or awards for extraordinary work—were repurposed as bribes for equipment or technical services or even drink tickets at company parties.

If the massage table wasn't available to depress beta-wave activity, there was always the blue room.

"I think we're at an impasse," I told Salar when we butted heads on a branding issue neither of us would concede. "I'll meet you in the blue room in fifteen minutes to decide