Week one

So just to give some context, one of the great things about the bubble years was that employees were really treated like rock stars. Of course there was the dark side of those times. The irresponsible spending, crazy hiring and poor management. There was so much demand for bodies that they were hiring anyone to do anything. I remember at Zack Networks we hired someone I shall refer to as Galactic Druid that not only couldn't tell his ass from a for loop, he had the audacity to try and tell our senior Engineer he didn't know, and that's when he wasn't too busy coming in at 3pm from raving all night or raiding the refrigerator for drinks.

Sorry for the digression... So the deal here at VMware is we get free lunches on Wedensday and free breakfast on Tuesday and Thursday. There are fully stocked kitchens on each floor with every soft drink, juice and snack known to mankind including my favorite Starbucks Mocha Frappachino drinks! Three kinds of freshly brewed Peet's coffee all day long, real Half & Half (three kinds of Milk too, for the cereal bar) and Yogurt, string cheese and all sorts of other stuff I haven't found yet. As if that wasn't enough, they pay to have a service deliver your lunch to you everyday from the local restaurants via a web page. You just select what you want off of today's menu before 10am and it shows up at lunch time.

Full health care, 3 weeks payed vacation your first year, enough office supplies to keep even King Missile happy and red swingline staplers by request. My only complaint, and it is minor, is they don't have a nice shiny G5 for me here, so I brought my own Mac from home (not like I have a shortage of them really.) They don't seem to mind ordering equipment here as they kindly provided me with a couple brand new Dual CPU workstation class Dell boxen. We have two gyms, a pool table, fooseball, pinball and a full arcade size Dance Dance revolution game.

I share my office with my old co-worker from Zack, Jon Shatz. the place is known around here as the bat cave due to it not having any outside windows and Jon's preference for almost total darkness. It works for me though as I too prefer a dim, low distraction environment for getting stuff done. The only issue is when I get up for a snack, the outside light is blindingly bright.

My commute is the only real downside so far. I have been unable to shave the time down to less than an hour each way. I'm not that interested in moving from my little Island of Alameda. But I will have to see how long I will be able to deal with the commute, and how long my old car will hold up. I will figure out a way to get some Japanese language tapes on the iPod and use the time for improving my language skills.