This is a photo of perhaps the most bizarre experience I had in the short two years and a bit I worked at Google.

We had been flown over the San Francisco, and then out to a beautiful place called Half Moon Bay, to have our teams yearly conference.  Google, with more money than King Solomon, couldn't find enough rooms for us.  So many of us had to share double beds...as a result of answering "Jessica Alba" to who I wanted to share a bed with, I ended up with a stranger.  Luckily when I trapsed in at three in the morning, he had made a bed on the floor.  I left him a note saying I'd take the floor the next night.  Not sure I ever did meet him.

So we were inside doing something for most of the morning, then it was announced we would be outside, including lunch for the next couple of hours.  None of us had brought huts, sunglasses, or sunscreen, but there you go.  They assembled us in a field, and a group of twenty somethings bounded one by one onto the stage, introducing themselves.  Once they had all assembled on the stage they said something to the effect of "and we are Team Awesome" before a collective high give.

I'm sketchy on the following details, but the photo above is where they had us all, experienced IT people in their 30s and 40s (though Google USA has more young grads) doing impressions of animals.  The helpful people on stage led us in the impressions, and we were also expected to do the noises as well.  Above they are doing an elephant.

I loved working at Google in London, but in many ways I wasn't a fit for it's corporate culture, especially seeing as I wasn't in Europe to pursue my career, but to have fun experiences.  As a couple of us used to say "We didn't drink the Koolaid".  Indeed I found it weird to be constantly reminded how great we were, that we were the best and brightest.  I thought my colleagues were amazing, but my immediate supervisors mediocre, which is fine except they seemed unaware of that fact. 

It was among the best couple of years of my working life, and was an unforgettable place to be in the still relatively early days of the company, when don't be evil was taken seriously, and the culture wars hadn't started internally.  Certainly I watched the London office go from a couple of hundred people to thousands.  Working for them in Sydney, and visiting offices around the world, including Zurich, Madrid, Oslo, Amsterdam, Tokyo, Paris, Munich, and the Googleplex in Mountain View California.

I took the above photo in disbelief as I was walking backwards out of this weird experience.  I wish I'd had the nous my fellow London colleagues did, who just went straight to the pub.