The Chicago Tribune At Random Column: At Empire Google: Gourmet Food and Personal Concierge
By James Warren, Chicago Tribune
Jan. 22–If history judges this period in America to be similar to the fall of the Roman Empire, replete with rampant hedonism, corruption and declining moral values, somebody might just check Jan. 22 Fortune’s cover story on the 100 best companies to work for.
At least for now, oh, to be a Googlite!
No surprise, Fortune’s winner is Google, where reporter Adam Lashinsky found “the roasted black bass with parsley pesto and bread crumbs” at the Cafe Seven campus eatery “had a delicate flavor, superior mouth feel, and a light yet satisfying finish that seemed to me unmatched among the 11 free gourmet cafeterias Google runs at its Mountain View, Calif., headquarters.”
The food, he writes, is just the appetizer.
“At Google you can do your laundry; drop off your dry cleaning; get an oil change, then have your car washed; work out in the gym; attend subsidized exercise classes; get a massage; study Mandarin, Japanese, and French; and ask a personal concierge to arrange dinner reservations. Naturally you can get haircuts onsite.”
“Want to buy a hybrid car?” Lashinsky continues. “The company will give you $5,000 toward that environmentally friendly end. Care to refer a friend to work at Google? Google would like that, too, and it’ll give you a $2,000 reward.”
“Just have a new baby? Congratulations! Your employer will reimburse you for up to $500 in takeout food to ease your first four weeks at home. Looking to make new friends? Attend a weekly TGIF party, where there’s usually a band playing. Five onsite doctors are available to give you a checkup, free of charge.”
Enough! There’s much more, including swimming pools and Wi-Fi-enabled commuter buses. All of which I’ll try to forget next time I stick a buck in the office vending machine for my tiny bag of Nacho Doritos. And I’ll forget what Fortune suggests is the unbridled arrogance of the Google workforce, who “almost universally see themselves as the most interesting people on the planet”; men and women on a mission “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”
As with empires, what goes around comes around for companies. Let’s check back on the free roasted black bass in 10 years.
Quickly: If you are freezing, it’s cruel and unusual punishment to peruse January-February Coastal Living, with tales and lush photos of sunny days in places as disparate as the Outer Banks, N.C., and the stunning southwest Pacific coast of Nicaragua. There’s also a lovely tale of a bunch of women who met in a yoga class in Cape Elizabeth, Maine, and now take a yearly trek together to either the Bahamas or Florida. … Jan. 20 The Economist inspects the typical, if no less shocking, lack of Chinese government accountability amid the nation’s biggest public-health scandal, the encouraging of peasants to boost their awful incomes by selling blood plasma. There were an estimated 55,000 commercial blood and plasma donors infected with HIV, with the ultimate number contracting the virus in the hundreds of thousands. … Budd Coates, a serious runner who’s head of employee health and fitness at Rodale Inc., publisher of Runner’s World, touts the glories of the 64-slice CT scan in the February issue, arguing that the 3-D images of the heart taken by the non-invasive scan found potentially lethal plaque buildup in one artery that traditional tests had missed. … Time is excellent on what we know about the brain, consciousness and what small children truly understand of the world around them. … Newsweek strains to go populist with a cover story on the just-released Missouri teen who’d been kidnapped, but is saved by other tales, including both a look at aid workers under fire in Darfur, and a good dissection of the tension between the White House and the Maliki government in Baghdad. … Slate.com’s excellent feature, “Explainer,” explores “How to Blow Up a Satellite,” in light of the Chinese apparently knocking down one of their own, laying out how they seemingly used a “kinetic kill vehicle,” which relies on mere force, not explosives.
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Copyright (c) 2007, Chicago Tribune
Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Business News.
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