Yesterday I was forced to had the opportunity to take a trip to Google Reston’s headquarters.
Apparently Mrs. Hanna saw that I liked technology (translation: turned her speakers on after she spent five minutes trying to figure out why her sound wasn’t on) and recommended me to go on the trip. Of coursed I took it up. Anyone who knows me and my internet life knows I’m a huge Google fanboy. It’s the best company ever. That’s right, I love them enough to give them free press. Even though maybe five people will read this. But in the world of advertising, you do whatever you can to get the word out.
So me and the other nine people got to miss the first four periods of school. We all went down and Mrs. Kirkpatrick drove us in her car. You’d think there would be a regulation against students riding in teachers’ cars. You’d think there would be a regulation against students breathing air molecules that were once within fifty meters of teachers’ cars. But I guess there wasn’t, and we got there alive and with all major organ systems intact.
Once we got in, we were taken into a little conference room with a guy named Mike. He gave us a tour of the offices (pics later in the post) and then sat us down to tell us some little-known, exclusive facts available to only us and anyone capable of using a search engine.
Then a bunch of the engineers came in for a Q&A session. What actually surprised me is that some people there actually had prepared thoughtful questions. But the engineers were nice, and didn’t bite, and actually took us (relatively) seriously, although I’m pretty sure one of them noticed me shaking my head after a kid my age asked an educated question about programming languages.
I found one on Google+. So now I have a person at Google I can whine to about not having vertical cell merging in Docs spreadsheets.
So in the end, a good time was had by all, except for the couple billion brain cells that perished.
Here are some photos of my adventure.
