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By Root 2009 0

worker's paradise, but I felt I didn't deserve it. I was putting in way more hours than I had at the Merc, but it never seemed enough to justify the bounty the company was bestowing upon me. As dot-coms slipped into insolvency all around us, I was constantly reminded how lucky I was, not only to have a job, but to have such a great job. Survivor's guilt tormented me. Yes, I was cranking out great volumes of material, but I wasn't pushing us quickly enough toward a global marketing strategy. Cindy knew it. She made it clear she wanted more urgency, more big ideas, more leadership from me. She was right: I could, I should do more. My days stretched longer. I hung around in the dark (but hardly empty) Googleplex forcing myself to be productive. Was I the only one feeling this insecure?

"I don't know if I can last here a year," search-quality guru Ben Gomes thought to himself after starting his first hard assignment. "I hope I can make it. I want to reach my vesting cliff." Gomes survived. "A few months later I started working on ranking," he recalls. "I was here till four a.m. and coming back at ten in the morning. My entire life was here. It was great. I really enjoyed it."*

The hours and the intensity fostered a sense of camaraderie among the night shift, especially when Larry and Sergey held court in their offices. They were so much easier to spot in the moonlight, stripped of the protective cover provided by blocked-out calendars. Meetings devoured daylight, but seven p.m. opened broad vistas of uninterrupted uptime. I could brew a fifth cup of coffee and face down the monstrosities lurking in forsaken corners of my to-do list. But first...

"Daddy? When are you coming home, Daddy?" one of the kids would croon as soon as I called the house. "I miss you and I want to see you." Kristen wasn't above fighting dirty in the war for my attention. "I love you Daaaddy."

How could I blame her? While I snuggled in the bosom of my new Google family, she picked up the parental duties I shirked. Playing pattycake, making macaroni, kissing boo-boos, and keeping the roof securely fastened on our little bungalow next door to a guy doing home-based auto repairs. All while lecturing local college students on Russian avant-garde cinema and Persian poetry of the thirteenth century.

My previous jobs had been in public broadcasting and newspapers, both infamous for obscenely inflated compensation packages, so money was never an issue unless we needed to buy something. Kristen didn't play the martyr, though I could discern her doubts.

"He was just ready to try something new," I heard her tell a friend on the phone. "It's Google. No. Goo-gle. Gooooo-gle. Like a baby sucking a pacifier. Yes, it's a real company. Well, not as real as the newspaper was..."

The feeling that I was failing at home while underachieving in a spectacular way at work shook me. There were so many things I could be doing better in both places that I started parsing my schedule into thirty-second segments and communicating in sentence fragments.

"Adam! Out of bed, dressed, and ready to go in ninety seconds." Adam was eleven. "Nathaniel. Bathroom? Socks and shoes in the car. Pants too." Nathaniel was six. "Avalon. Diapee?" Avalon was one.

Surprisingly, children are not onboard with that mode of interaction. I had to force myself to remember that the goal of being a father is not to download a set of instructions, check for understanding, and then move on to the next task on an endless list.

Meanwhile, status requests showed up in my inbox at midnight asking about assignments handed out five hours earlier. Instant messages arrived minutes later.

"Just wondering. Where are you with the text for the browser buttons? We need to check in the code in an hour."

If one task fell behind schedule, the project circling behind would sink lower and lower until it slid to a fiery end on a foam-covered runway. I wanted to take the time to do everything right—polish the prose and perfect the text, double-check the targeting, and drop it precisely on the intended audience. The engineers