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company happy hour
Friday, October 6 2000
In celebration of the completion of the successful move of most of the technical staff to my new building, my company hosted a company-wide happy hour in the building's freshly-scrubbed courtyard. The were kegs of beer, bottles of wine, and lots of finger food, very little of which acceptable for vegetarians (I didn't care). There are hundreds of people working for my company now, and as I looked around I had to ask myself, "are all these people really drawing salaries?" I've been working almost independently for the last six months, interacting with a mere handful of people. I'd seen most of these people before, but I knew very few of them. So I mostly stuck with a few individuals: Evan, the guy who got me this job, the woman who's leading the UK effort, and K___, the German guy who (up until the ongoing re-org) was part of my Community team.
Most refreshing of all was the presence of so many hip & hot music industry chicks in my building! On my entire floor, you see, one can count the non-men on one hand, and a good fraction of those are either my future boss or my former boss! Women, you see, are terribly under-represented in the world of web development. But in the rest of the company, they're found in much higher concentrations.
Not that I knew any of these ladies well enough to say hello, but it was good just knowing they still exist.
The spread was so bountiful that I called my housemate John to invite him over, but he was too busy preparing for a weekend he'd be spending in Las Vegas and never showed up.
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I was so drunk and spirited from the company happy hour that I had trouble containing my boundless energy. I actually recorded three full tracks of a "song" on my four track, and periodically revisited my guitar for the rest of the evening to bang out disorganized little chordal riffs.
Later on John and I went down to the little coffee shop on the corner of Rochester and Centinela, the one glimmer of genuine community in our neighborhood. There were only a few people there, and two of them were staff. One old drunk white guy showed up, evidently drawn (like us) by the lure of genuine community. But then he started causing trouble, calling one of the Asian employees a "gook." So of course he was asked to leave.
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