I just wanted to fill you folks in on a couple of the things that I forgot to include in my liveblogging posts. Along the way there were a couple things that I was trying to keep track of and ended up just tossing in a draft here but now that I am almost done my work term I’ve got some time to put the rest of them up. Without further ado, the rest of the trip:
On the Friday (April 6) when we first showed up at Times Square we saw the Ernst & Young building and Yassir told us that he had a contact there through his sister, Madiha, and that we could probably go for a tour. After trying to call his cell phone a couple times while we walked to the building, we entered the lobby and asked to use the internal phone to try to get a hold of this so called contact. While that also didn’t pan out, we learned how the Ernst & Young building keeps so spotlessly clean: there were multiple people in the lobby who continuously swept the floor. The floor that was already sparkling and clean.
Later on, while still in Times Square, Yassir and I wanted to head into Toys R Us. The front of the store has one massive revolving door as the entrance and exit, which would be fine if there was a steady flow of people going in both directions. The door, however, had so many redundant and sensitive security features that it would stop turning about every second, impeding the flow of the crowds that were gathered on both sides of the door. Needless to say, as a group of three mechatronics engineers we were not impressed in the slightest. I ended up buying a Wiimote and a nunchuck for the Wii I bought later that week as they had bins of them.
The last thing I had forgotten to include (again from Friday, I must have been tired…) was a couple of quotes from when we were at the Google offices with Mike. The first is the phrase ‘double-plus ungoogly’ which was written in large letters across the middle of one of the random ideas boards, which we found highly amusing and kept repeating throughout the trip. The other was that in the entrance area of the office, there is a projector showing frequent and random searches on Google in real time on the floor. As we all had to get temporary stickers and sign NDAs to get in, we watched it for a while laughing at some of the search words. Our all time favorite, again something we kept repeating during the trip, was ‘jealous boy lyrics’ which I can only assume was a song writer at a loss for how to put his jealousy into words.
Finally, I will leave you with a quote from each of the guys in the van for the weekend. Please note that all of these were taken completely out of context, mostly for our own amusement. Jeff - “Lint brush”, Yassir - “It’s loyalty to your genitals!”, and myself - “Canada is the Mexico of the North!”.
