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No one was immune. When a user left a book on the Enter key and sent the same query to Google thirty-nine thousand times, Ray cut off access for everyone at that address. The query was "This is the CIA," and it came from that agency's headquarters in Langley, Virginia. Another user searched for "net oil importers" over and over and over again. Ray got annoyed and shut off the State Department as well.

If Ray couldn't identify a specific IP address, he contacted the spammer's Internet service provider (ISP) and asked that they track down the offender themselves and sever his access to Google. If the ISP refused to play along, Ray upped the ante—he blocked access to Google from all of the ISP's addresses. That usually got their attention. It was how Ray shut down access to Google for most of France. The French ISP definitely noticed, all the more so because at the time they were negotiating to become one of our larger customers.

Ray didn't hate the French. He did the same thing to the Germans. Also to a major American ISP, though he did post a note to their customers who complained. "The short story here," he wrote, "is that some user at your ISP was abusing Google. We were unfortunately unable to turn off access just for this evil individual. Since your ISP didn't respond to us, we had no choice but to shut off access to Google from a large number of IP addresses."

Cindy was, as she put it, "displeased" when she read Ray's note reprinted in a headline article on CNET describing Google's rude treatment of users. She "suggested" that I take over user communication related to service interruptions and "work with" Ray to smooth out the rougher edges in his correspondence. It was hard for me to keep up, because Ray was all about initiative. He was not part of the company's business-development team according to the org chart, but he never let reporting lines fence him in.

"Well, to be blunt," Ray told a partner who wanted to renew a deal for Google technology, "it's clear to us what you get out of our relationship, but it's far from clear to us that we get anything out of it. Given that, it seems like poor business practice for us to continue with it. So, unless I'm missing some key observation here, please stop performing Google searches immediately."

Many things made Ray wroth. He sent out long notes to all Googlers demanding we clean up the kitchens, the locker rooms, our interviewing techniques, our security practices, our personal habits, and our grammar. He also urged us to recycle our trash at every opportunity. Once a burr got under his saddle, he didn't wait for it to work itself out. "Can we please, please, please finally just end our relationship with these leeches?" he begged of Larry Page when another partner continued to annoy him. "If only to make me happy?"

Impulsive and opinionated, Ray will always personify for me Google's engineering id, a lone cowboy patrolling the electronic frontier in shocking-pink shorts, facing down the black hats and making them blink, then riding off into a sunset that was only half as colorful as he was.

A single engineer holding that kind of power speaks to the assumptions inherent in Google's culture. Individuals were considered capable of weighing the effects of their actions and presumed to have the best interests of the company (and Google's users) at heart. We were encouraged to act on those interests without hesitation. Spend time doing, not deciding.

Of all the elements of "big-company thinking" I had to unlearn, that was one of the hardest. I constantly sought reassurance that I was empowered to move to the next step, only to be asked, "Why haven't you finished that already?" The upside of this philosophy is that Google did things quickly, most of which turned out to be positive. The downside is that individual Googlers sometimes misinterpreted exactly how much power they possessed and when it was okay to use it.

Shari had discovered the downside the hard way. She had reached the breaking point