Every Day is Election Day

Last Summer, as an Online Sales intern with Google Ireland, I was sent - along with all the other European Interns - to a collective Expo at the London Offices. This is it, as it happened.

Day 1 - Thursday 3rd August 2006
Dublin
6am - My alarm goes off. I wonder why the hell I set it for 6am. I hit the snooze button on the Nokia a couple of times and eventually get up to shower at about 6:40am, after which I dress and leave the house for the UCD front gate.

8:02am - Chris unexpectedly shows up at the UCD front gate. All of a sudden there’s company for the Aircoach, and my Hotpress nicked from the Union offices the previous evening is made redundant. The bus takes ages to come.

9:35am - Get into the check-in area where the girls of the party are literally a matter of feet ahead of us. The check-in is routine (I love those touch-screen dealies) but bizarrely, Rob, who checks in with us, is given a seat one row and four seats away. We all head to the gate where John has already been, thinking the departure (and not the check-in) was 9:20am. Donal and Elaine finish off their posters (why did I bunk off some training sessions to finish mine then?!). Most of the undergrads end up in the same section of the plane which provides some giggles, especially when Andre notices Keira Knightley is on the front of the inflight magazine.

London
10:35am - Arrival in Heathrow. The taxiing back to the buildings is almost as long as the flight itself, but we get great views of Twickenham on the way into landing. Excellent. The baggage takes a while, and we all eventually set off to find an ATM willing to hand over some Sterling. Eventually we find one, get our Tube tickets and head for the platforms.

12:55pm - We finally make it to the Tube platform, but three of the guys manage to make one train before it hops off and leaves the rest of us behind. Apparently then we manage to leave another few on the platform the next time around. Lots of expensive roaming-rate texts are exchanged, but eventually everyone finds each other at Victoria station, having gotten connecting trains at three different intermittent stations.

2:45pm - Right on schedule, we arrive at Belgrave House on Buckingham Palace Road, floors 4 and 5 of which comprise Google’s UK offices. We grab some drinks and settle down for the intro stuff. We play some games to help get acquainted with everyone else and then have brainstorming sessions - which I’m glad to say I contributed well to, and which in general were really productive - before the beers.

5pm - In our honour, the UK guys hold a TGIT (it’s like a TGIF but on Thursday) which is an unbearably surreal moment. The weather clears off brilliantly from the earlier murky drizzle and the sun breaks through, leaving me in the situation where I’m in the heart of the financial district of one of humanity’s biggest civilisations, on top of a glass building worth billions, as an international business traveller, aged 19 wearing casual clothes drinking beer on a rooftop. It was a real perspective moment.

After that we head off for a Tapas meal, which goes down well. After that we get the cabs from the office back to the hotel, which isn’t far down the river from the Houses of Parliament and which is pretty plush and with an ubermodern TV/internet system.

9pm-ish: we head down to the hotel bar and begin the night. The bar proves a little too chic and expensive so we go looking for another, but bizarrely most bars in London shut at 11pm on a Thursday. Eventually, after much hmming and hawwing regarding plans for the night, we end up cabbing to Soho where at about midnight we get into a late bar called Taboo which isn’t much cheaper but feels a little more like we’d gone out in London. We cabbed back at standard Dublin hoofing-out time (about 2:30am) and make it into the bed ready for the 8am journey back to the offices.

Day 2 - Friday 4th August 2006
7:15am - The Nokia alarm goes off again and John stumbles off into the shower while I dress. We all meet at 7:30am in the lobby to begin cabbing back to the offices on Buckingham Palace Road where breakfast is being laid on for us at 8am.

9am - A long and leisurely breakfast finished with, we move to the room reserved for us so that we can get our posters together. This is the actual purpose for our being in London: we’re due to hold a poster expo where we all examine each others posters, which themselves are supposed to explain or embody our internships and what we’re doing for the company itself. The problem being, I thought it was more of a presentation thing rather than an expo so my poster is almost entirely devoid of lettering (aside from the words ‘Google’, ‘Summer ‘06′, ‘Ben & Jerry’s’ and ‘Guinness’) and therefore means nothing to most of the other Googlers. Accordingly, my poster goes largely unexplained while I do the rounds looking at other posters.

10am - The undergrad bit of the show done with, we take a slight breather before Aoife and I are brought in for our interviews. While everyone was together in one place, the bosses decided to have a HR movie put together looking for soundbites to put alongside an inspirational video montage. Aoife and I are picked, probably because of our backgrounds in student media and therefore our knowledge of what sounds good and what doesn’t. After eventually finding the room, I feed them some stuff about how it wasn’t just any old internship, and how we got to meet and liaise with top management and didn’t end up just making tea, etc etc. After this we pop over and back between the pool tables/giant Connect 4 game and the atrium where the poster shows (now of the MBA interns and later the engineers) are going on up until the lunchtime. The engineering one is pretty kickass, looking at some of the new stuff in the pipelines both for internal use and as external consumer products. One of the guys I ended up beside at the dinner is working on something ridiculously useful and ubercool. I begin to wonder why I hadn’t ever considered Computer Science as a degree.

12:30pm - We grab a sandwich and sushi lunch and I begin a game of Jenga with Chris and Jacob before we’re split up into groups for a scavenger hunt around SW1 and the general St James’s/Green Park area at 1pm. We have to identify some statues from pictures required, attribute quotes and do a few photo challenges (get snapped in a deckchair facing the London Eye, helping a tourist, squashed into a red phone box, playing Frisbee in Green Park, and so on.)

2:45pm - We get back to the offices right on the deadline - spotting one of the elusive statues on the way back - and I meet with Chris and Jacob to finish off the Jenga game, which has miraculously managed to remain standing throughout the two-and-a-half hour idle time. Eventually Chris and I both pull out pieces leaving rows with only one block in each (we’re playing a special garden version of Jenga where there are four blocks in a row) and Jacob becomes the inevitable distructor.

4pm - People begin to disperse, so we say our goodbyes to the few that we won’t see again (including our own Nirad, an MBA who’s finished his eight-week stint having started with us) and make our way back towards the hotel. I have a shower because it’s turning into a hot afternoon and I’ve stupidly been wearing two layers, one of which is an Irish rugby shirt, so patriotically cheesy you can practically scrape Brie off it. We agree to meet again in the girls’ room at 6pm and then head into Piccadilly to meet the lads (who’ve booked rooms elsewhere, away from the hotel) for the night, where we go to get food, eventually settling on Pizza Hut.

7:20pm - We go in search of some pubs, starting with a place called Buzz Bar in nearby Leicester Square. I go to the bar and notice that the only beers I’ve heard of are Fosters or Guinness (not a beer, I know, but whatever). I end up ordering my first traditional pint of Guinness ever - in a bar in the centre of London. Strange fact for an Irishman. Some waitresses come around with a bundle of fruit shots and tequila (refreshing and dull respectively) and we get another couple of pints in before we move on. I chat with Chris about women and cameras and make stupid jokes that he freely admits he wouldn’t laugh at if he was sober.
“What’s the compliment to a 54′ angle?”
“My, you’re looking very acute today…”
Randomly enough, ‘Impressive Instant’ by St Germain comes on. I recall it from the Nerd.Box Music Exchange 2004 and text Lenine to tell her. The second she replies, Morcheeba comes on. Also from the Exchange.

10:45pm (-ish, who knows?!) - We make a move, stroll through Leicester Square and eventually get led by a promos girl to a club called Metra which seems to be a pretty nice spot. We stay quite a while (losing Andre and Jacob who go pulling along the way) and eventually drop Chris back to their hostel, where we find the Nordics, who strayed back there themselves. I shall deliberately omit the bit where I get chatted up by an older bald guy in the lift up to their room. We cab it back to the hotel and get in at about 4am. I agree with the girls to meet in the lobby again at 9, to get to the London Eye at 9:30am in order to beat the queues.

4:20am - I get a text from a classmate, in Dublin, who’s unaware that I’m in London, and who’s quite drunk. I roll over and go straight back to sleep.

Day 3 - Saturday August 5th 2006
8:45am - Again, the Nokia alarm wakes me up. I grab a shower while John eases himself out of a 13-hour nap. We hit the lobby at 9 expecting to meet the girls but it seems my text wakes them up, and they tell us to go ahead to the Eye and meet whoever else is coming. At the foot of the eye we meet Chris, who’s been snapping away all morning, and then Donal.

Eventually the girls catch up with us, we get our tickets - a bit steep at £13 - and begin to line up.

10:15am - We get into our little bubble - there are fifteen or so occupants and we’re six of them - and slowly we begin to soar over the city. The price was worth it: the views are spectacular.

10:50am - The Eye having gone full circle, we get off and take a leisurely walk in the growing sun eastward and across the river, with the eventual aim of getting to Covent Garden. Along the way we come across some street performers, the first of which is a guy trapped in a suitcase holding a sign saying ‘Don’t Let Me Out’. Which would be all the more convincing had the hand holding the sign not looked obviously plastic, and had there not been two guys glaring at us from the nearest bench when we derided its fakeness. Across the walkway there was another guy with a far better act involving being ‘dressed’ as the Invisible Man.

11:50am - We get to Covent Garden and amble around, eventually settling on the nicely prim Café Piazza to get breakfast/lunch/brunch at. We order as Big Ben strikes noon, and spend the early afternoon dining al fresco at Covent Garden.

Eventually Tobias, one of the Parisiens, joins us too and when we finish and have a good study of our maps we decide to head to Oxford Street for a bit. Along the way, leaving Covent Garden, we come across the guy who did the tennis ball stunts in the Kaiser Chiefs’ video for Modern Way. I’m upset by the fact that of the party of eight, I’m the only one who’s even seen the video.

We get to Oxford Street and give ourself about 45 minutes to amble around before we need to Tube back to the hotel to pick up our luggage before heading for Heathrow. Of course, none of us know what we want to do with ourselves so eventually six of us go for the nearest Starbucks, where to conquer the blaring 33′C heat outside I grab an iced caramel macchiato, which is quite possibly the nicest drink ever. Some of the others grab food which seems a bit daft having only come from breakfast but they argue that they probably won’t eat again until they get inside their front doors back home a few hours away.

When the time comes, we head back to Vauxhall and walk to the hotel, where I take one last picture of the view from the front before we go back towards the city and on to Heathrow.

In Heathrow (where the party of three, the others being Anne-Marie and Elaine, are now seriously sweaty because we’ve been on two packed Tubes stuffed underground below intense heat, with any coats/jackets we’d worn over and with all our bags) I buy a travel version of Trivial Pursuit to get rid of my English coinage. We play a little bit in the departures lounge at Gate 82 in Terminal 1 and then again on the plane - until Anne-Marie throws the dice accidentally onto the floor and it rolls out of eyesight. As the plane comes into land, she then notices one of the stewardesses asking around to see who owned it - it had managed to roll eleven rows towards the front just because we were in a slight descent. As we pass the stewardess on the way out and thank her - and explain what exactly the strange, colour-only dice is - I ask her if she saw what colour it landed on. She laughs and dismisses us, not knowing that she’s destroyed the whole game.
Dublin
7:50pm - I bid the girls farewell, and hop on the AirCoach (which, mercifully, is air conditioned) and head back towards the UCD front gate. As I walk through campus I call Mum to let her know where I am, and get a text message from a friend who’d caught sight of me from the 46A that was passing by. “Just went by you on the bus, you had an odd facial expression.” That’s what happens when I’m caught off-guard by the warm UCD air and I’m singing Subterranean Homesick Alien by Radiohead.

You can see three whole albums’ worth of London pics at the Photos secion of mein Bebo.