Microsoft@Redmond

Well, we didn't get the opportunity to get into any of the Microsoft buildings in the first 2 days and it got us really restless...we had seen them from outside ofcourse, because Redmond is filled with them. Redmond is a small village in Washington state and I should say it is "filled with" Microsoft. To my knowledge there are atleast 115 buildings there...these are not huge ones though, each would have a maximum of two floors, the exceptions being the buildings containing offices of Bill and Steve which are 4 storied ones. Since Washington area is prone to earthquakes, there are limits on the number of floors a building can have.

The buildings are all surprisingly similar from outside (even our new campus at Hyderabad has the same exteriors), but very distinct on the interi0rs. Each building has a theme for the interior decorations. Ours was Paintings, and the walls were filled with illustrated paintings. JP's building theme was customers, they would be filled with life-size "cut-outs" of different customers of Microsoft, one would be a German customer, explaining his features, like "Marc was born in Germany and is an accountant, he has been using Windows 98 for a long time and is thinking of moving over to XP. But of-late he has been hearing a lot of stuff about something called Linux. He is an advanced user of Excel 98 and..." I am not doing a good job of reconstructing the profile here..:(...anyway it would be focussed on a German customer's perspective on software.

There is no concept of cubicles here and everyone from the lowest level programmer to the CEO gets a cabin for himself/herself. We saw cabins decorated in every wild way possible. In one cabin we saw some 200 cans of pepsi, coke etc piled neatly one on top of another to form a man-sized pyramid. Some people had comfortable sofas installed on their office. We saw a few people who used to sit on the floor outside their offices working on their laptop..couldnt figure out why...maybe they liked it that way.

I and JP were lucky to get our own cubicles all for ourselves since others had to share an office due to lack of space. But I got so bored sitting all alone day long that when Arun came over I made him share the office with me.

The kitchen deserves a special mention, the principle seemed to be anything liquid is free and everything else is charged...there was a really huge refrigirator housing hundereds of cans of coke, pepsi, chocolate milk (my favourite ofcourse:)), sprite and a number of American drinks like Dr. Pepper (it has a real horrible taste) and canned fruit juices like apple, cranberry, grape etc. There was also a pay-with-a-coin style parlour which housed stuff like chips chocolates and everything to make you fat (and people blamed me for getting fat after the trip!!!!)

People who were really busy (or atleast pretended to be) put a sticker outside their offices saying "DND-Email Only". I really liked the way in which people respected other's privacy. Even my mentor (an Indian) would get my consent before setting up a meeting or even for coming over casually to meet me).

There is a huge ground where football and cricket(!!!) were the favourite sports. We played quite a bit there. Apart from these, things that deserve a passing mention are the continuous shuttles which carried people around these 100-odd buildings, huge (really huge) car parks below the buildings, the fooseball table(which we managed to get here as well), the state a hall in Building 34 (Bill Gates's office is in this building!!) was after some beer-bash (it was just like what a director would love to show if he wanted to protray some "Saraaya-kadai" fight scene in Usilampatti-really nasty and last but definitely not the least my own office overlooking the street and the beautiful drops of rain dripping on the glass every time there was a drizzle:).

Life after Hostel...

This is a mail I wrote recently to my hostel groups...(edited a few sentences to protect privacy of some of my friends)

Hi all,

So nice to see this group up and running. I thought I would do my bit to keep the discussions flowing in the group.

There are quite a few things I miss about college life...the comforts of life have definitely increased manifold mainly due to the new-found financial independence...but still here are a few things that have changed....

1. My slippers dont get lost anymore...a few days back I was searching wildly for my pair of bathroom slippers to go to the terrace….and then found them on my roommate's feet. We laughed over the fun times we used to have searching for our slippers in the hostel from room to room early in the morning and I have been guilty of putting on the first pair that I can set my eyes on in PN’s room or AN’s room or wherever with the good intention of returning it where I took it…just when I am done..someone would come over and ask for it “Machan…koncham seruppu kodaen…” then I would give it saying “Return it to PN’s room…” and there begins the never-ending journey of the chappals…
2. No more gang-watching of movies…though we guys in Hyderabad gather together almost every weekend to watch a VCD movie (we even watched 2 telugu movies..) there is nothing like those “hot” days when 15-20 people used to cram into a room to watch a movie (the first movie on my comp was “Kadhal Azhivathillai…” and I had to run some 4 shows daily for 3 days as the demand was so high).
3. No more queues in bathrooms….first year we used to run all the way from yoga class to the bathrooms and whoever reached first would bath first….then we used to have buckets queued outside…but when people started putting their buckets a day before…then we started the amazing practice of “solli vaippathu..” till date that is the best application of a linked list I have seen…
4. No more birthday fun…we do celebrate birthdays….but nothing like those wonderful nights when starting 12am we used to be dripping wet after lots and lots of bums and a dip in the holy “thotti” water…I was lucky to be among a benevolent set of friends to be getting only some 5-minute bumps….I really used to pity (though I also gave them my share) some fellows whose bumps kept going endlessly for hours with stalwarts like AN doing their job…
5. No more discussions…But the thing I miss the most are the marathon discussions we used to have on anything from sex to Ramayana and Mahabaratha….every time there was an assessment we would go to some room with the sole intent of “studying”…then as we dozed off with the books…someone would ask some doubt…that would lead to something else…then something else….finally after 2 hours we found ourselves at the same page but having discussed 101 “important” things…boy that was fun….

These are only a few things I can spell out right now…but I am sure there are 100s of other things which made those four years memorable…

Those were really memorable days...every minute was fun:)