I'm Feeling Lucky_ The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59 - Douglas Edwards [49]
Ben Smith,* Ray Sidney, Bogdan Cocosel, and John Bauer also had the skill to kill and swaggered and swore and vowed vengeance when forced by crashing servers to abandon play just because Google was in a tailspin somewhere.
"We're down? Where? The East Coast? All right, just a minute, it's four a.m. there. No one will notice while I finish this round."
The games became so rowdy that play was forbidden during daylight hours, giving rise to email challenges that flew all through the night, often consisting of no more than the simple subject line "My soul still burns."
Cosmic Charlie, How Do You Do?
"No thanks," I told Charlie Ayers. "I don't eat that."
"That's because your mama never made them like this," Charlie replied, leaning across the steaming trays with the grinning confidence of a used-car salesman. "Most people overcook lima beans until they're gray and mealy. You have to serve them fresh and green."
"Um. Okay," I said, putting five lima beans on my plate.
"And try this," Charlie said, sweeping his hand over a tray overloaded with gold-encrusted chicken parts as if it were a cherry Thunderbird driven only by a Baptist widow to Sunday prayer meetings. "You know where I got the recipe for this? I got this recipe from Elvis Presley's personal chef. This is the exact same Southern-fried chicken the King and Colonel Tom Parker used to eat. Tell me that's not the best damn chicken you ever tasted."
While I wrestled with where I fit in the company, Charlie Ayers had no doubt about where he belonged: in the kitchen. Charlie was the chef Larry and Sergey had hired the week I came onboard. He had immediately begun converting the downstairs dining area into a working café (he corrected anyone déclassé enough to call it a cafeteria). In his oft-voiced professional opinion, the facilities were deplorably inadequate for what he wanted to do: re-create the healthy organic menu he had served while catering for concert promoter Bill Graham Presents. While we eventually shorthanded Charlie's story to "former chef for the Grateful Dead," he always made it clear that the Dead had never hired him; he had just prepared meals for them on occasion. "It wasn't the stuff I was feeding him that killed him," Charlie protested when staffers made cracks about Jerry Garcia's heft and untimely demise.
With sixty-plus Googlers to feed—most of them young with the caloric intake of orcas—Charlie sweated through daily lunch and dinner with only sous chef Jim Glass and a couple of kitchen staffers to help prep and clean up.
"Goddamn the oven," Charlie could be heard to mutter. "Goddamn the refrigerator. Goddamn the dishwasher." The catechism continued, embracing the serving line, the layout of the room, the sinks, the suppliers, and his skinflint bosses, Larry and Sergey. Charlie cursed the uncaring employees—fresh from college food services—who took more than they could eat or brought guests in unannounced, nullifying his careful menu math. And through it all, he delivered one incredible meal after another.
Charlie made everything on the premises except for the bread, which was dropped off outside the kitchen each morning in gray bins marked bread only—not for garbage. He selected his ingredients with a bias toward organically grown produce from local farms, and he railed against processed foods like the creamy gelatin-filled yogurt I preferred to the lumpy organic style he insisted was healthier. Compared with the Merc's Front Page Café, with its limp greens and greasy grilled cheese,