Belly Of The Beast

We had a ping pong tournament today.  My company versus Facebook.  It was supposed to be a mismatch – they have 3000 employees in Seattle, we have 200.  Yet we managed to win 3-2 – including a tournament-winning glorious lop-sided victory for yours truly.  To be honest, it wasn’t their best set of players – their 2 best players were WAY better than any of us, but we were able to handle the others quite comfortably.  Then to crown the victory, we ate at the Facebook cafeteria.  One of the many perks of going to their office – free food.  It wasn’t quite the extreme Silicon Valley-esque work environment I was expecting, instead just Ikea type furnishings mostly populated by young and male employees.  But to make up for working long and tough hours they do have a lot of benefits – as well as free food, I saw a laundry service, haircuts, I’m sure they probably also have a gym and dog-sitting service.  But their presence in Seattle, along with Amazon and a load of new buildings currently going up for Google, is why the traffic and cost-of-living is atrocious and only going to get worse.  I’m not a Facebook fan – I think I deleted my original account a long time ago, and might have only logged in once or twice since to look up somebody.  And of course, they are one of the many guilty parties for distributing fake news.  So I wouldn’t want to work there – but happy to eat their free food and whip their asses at ping pong!