Vincent Cheung

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Saturday, May 06, 2006

Cinco de Mayo?

First time I even heard the term was like a month ago. It's supposed to be like Mexico's equivalent to Independence Day, though I'm also told that this is not particularly accurate. Anyways, it's something that is actually celebrated down here. I think it's just an excuse to party and get drunk. They sure as hell don't celebrate Canada Day....

There were like tv ads for "Cinco de Mayo" sales. What does Oreo cookies have to do with Mexico and why should they be on sale for Cinco de Mayo?.... I don't get it. Looks like another bastardization of a holiday...

Google had a Cinco de Mayo theme for lunch. Outdoor BBQ and a live band, which was presumedly Mexican. I'm not totally sure, but I'll give them the benefit of the doubt. No one really paid much attention to them as they were too preoccupied with food. Some guy was also going around with a tequila bottle. I wonder if Google paid the band to play. I think the band was for the most part a no name band, at least no one knew who they were or had heard of them before, though none of us are really in the latino scene. I'm sure that they helped to pay for the set-up costs and equipment rental or something, oh, and the free food.

The rumoured Noogler humiliation on their first friday meeting where they have to wear beanie hats with propellers and half sandwich board signs and get ridiculed in front of the whole company, including Sergey and Larry, was over hyped. We stood up for like 5 sec. and that was that. There were quite a number of us so it was like whatever... I have never seen slides been flipped so fast before, as Sergey reviewed all the stuff that happened over the last week. I guess the whole thing is really about the Q&A session, which is cool b/c it lets anyone in the company directly ask Sergey and Larry (the billionaries that pay my salary) any question that they want. Eric Schmidt (Mr. CEO) chimed in a few times.

The intern co-ordinators were right when they said that you become good friends with the people that are in orientation with you. Well, for one, none of us really know any one else. Two, we were all in the same training sessions and we'd have the same lunch breaks, and it's just natural for us to sit together. So far, my social life at Google has revolved around the meal schedule. Using the internal communication methods, we managed to organized a sizeable number of us to go out and celebrate Cinco de Mayo. The suggestion to go some place to play pool and fooseball and get some drinks was shot down pretty quickly as we actually wanted to leave the campus :p

We soon discovered that places in Mountain View don't stay open that late. We did manage to get some drinks at a restaurant/brewery and just chill. The waitress was like, "really? none of you are getting food?", and we were like "ummm... we ate already". We also got to the point of the night when the Americans in the group realized that they were dramatically out numbered. That's always a fun moment :). I marked the occassion of my first Cinco de Mayo with my inaugural black out. One second I'm standing, the next I'm sitting up against a wall and I had no idea how I got from point A to B or how much time had passed. I didn't even have that much to drink. I think it was because of sitting so long and then just suddenly gettin up and getting too light headed. I'm also going to blame it on the altitude like Rob. At least I was in a private area with no audience and came out of it with no physical damage or enlargement of my hole. I like to think that I'm sober enough to blog right now.

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