I was due to meet my friends Rick and Dr Webber for lunch this afternoon at the offices of Google, where all of the food is free and the office is a blast-and-a-half.
Unfortunately, although I usually don't have conference calls until 2 PM (which would give me plenty of time to go to lunch), my boss had asked to move up our conference call that day to 1:15 PM, so I was struggling a bit with how I would manage the call and lunch, but figured I would try my best.
I got to the office and met Rick, and after waiting for a short while Dr Webber joined us. We immediately went in to grab a table, because apparently as Google has been expanding they have run out of space, and so there's no longer enough room in the cafeteria for everyone to sit down to eat. We then got our food, which had seemed so impressive to me the first time I saw the place, but after seeing my company's training center outside of Chicago, I realised that it was all much the same. Although, as in both cases, I realised if I worked there all of the time I would easily gain 30 lbs, there was so much food and it was all so delicious!
Interestingly during our discussion we talked about how annoyed scientists can get when it comes to dinner-table conversation, because while humanities people expect everyone to talk about humanities, if scientists bring up science topics, the humanities people will protest that they can't follow technical science conversations. It was an interesting point that was driven home later that same day, when I found myself on the phone with my new Senior Executive team lead, who turns out not to understand basic maths and excel. It turns out that I might have more in common with those scientists than I first thought...
Rick apparently will be heading back towards your end of the world to do another Asia trip soon, although he said he thinks that he'll only make it to Sydney this time. That boy sure is on the road a lot!
It was too soon time for my call, but Rick found me a random "phone booth" in the office (quite literally a red phone booth like you would find on the streets of London), and I managed to stay tucked up in there and conduct my entire conference call, using the Google guest network and talking on our internal chat client. The call actually went rather well, although I certainly did not mention to my boss that I was conducting company business at another company's offices!
That was in quite a contrast to the call I had with my boss and our team's Senior Executive later that afternoon, which was pretty much a total disaster. I suppose it was unfortunate that my headset wasn't working, and then I never heard the SE trying to interrupt. With only dead silence on the other end, why not keep talking, right? Except then apparently she DID have questions (ridiculously basic ones, I might add), and so I looked like an idiot for not hearing her apparently "shouting" at me. At which point she gave me some very condescending advice about basic presentation skills.
I guess that set the tone for the rest of the conversation, because it just all went downhill from there, and I left the call frustrated and disgusted. Thank goodness it was the end of the work day, as I certainly didn't want to do much more after that. Such a great company in the morning, such a terrible one in the afternoon!
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