During my time at Google I was usually the “old guy” on my team, which is very full circle considering I was so young when I started at Apple that I got the title “Boy Guru” printed on my business cards. When my Google team had an Office Space Day in honor of the Mike Judge classic, I didn’t know much about the movie, which was beloved by my younger co-workers. That’s probably why it didn’t bug me when they gave me this red stapler as part of the festivities.
As the highlight of Office Space Day, we took the afternoon off and got together in the office to watch the movie. Google had just started a program called Lookout that provided every group with a Mac mini strapped to a big screen monitor placed on a mobile cart. The idea was for teams to use these for showing some kind of dashboard information: bug counts, build status, deployment stats, etc. The large screens would be set up in team areas, and everybody could see how they were doing at a glance. We had just gotten ours, and we weren’t using it for anything yet, so we decided the big monitor would be perfect for showing the Office Space movie that afternoon. Clever! Innovative! Team-building!
So there we were, about half an hour into the movie, eating popcorn and drinking beer and laughing and enjoying the show and building camaraderie, when suddenly a Furious Dude none of us knew stomped into our area. He actually looked kind of like Milton, the old red stapler guy from the movie. He went directly to the screen showing the movie, dramatically yanked out the Mac mini power cord, ripped away the Velcro straps holding the Mac in place, stuck it under his arm, and stalked off, as we sat there too stunned to react.
This was probably the most violent and exciting thing I ever saw at Google.
Later we found out that we weren’t supposed to be using the Lookout device for frivolities like watching movies. Not only that, the Lookout team had set up Mac screen sharing, so they could monitor what every Lookout device was doing from their lair elsewhere on campus. And when they saw our unauthorized use, The Man took decisive action.
The next day, our manager got an email saying we had lost our Lookout privileges. Then somebody came and took the rest of it away, the monitor and cart.
But I still have the stapler.
I know when people say 'laughed out loud' they don't really mean it, but when I read this, I laughed out loud. I mean it