Vacation fever is running rampant on the Microsoft campus -- as people are gearing up to take some time off, schedules seem to be jam packed with "meetings" and "priorities" and other unjustifiable excuses for not joining the Cafeteria Tour. Good golly people, you need to occasionally focus on things that are irrelevant and unimportant, or your heads might burst!![]()
Tour Stop #20: Yesterday's visit to the Building 25 cafeteria was nice -- as you can see in the picture to the left, John and Ryan were fully engaged in game console war stories, with John chatting about possibly taking advantage of the employee offer on the
Xbox Live, and Ryan telling his sad tale of buying almost the exact same package -- a couple weeks
before the employee offer. Ouch. Retail always hurts. Mike and I pretended to be interested, but mostly just stared at John's half-eaten pesto cheese stick things. Mmmm...poly-unsaturated fats.
The highlights of the conversation were the flagrant slams against the fresh-off-the-trucks PS3 game console, which also seems to be getting kicked around a bit in the press, such as this New York Times review. Here's a video of the exchange at our table:
Video: cafeteria 25
And it was all caught on video. That's right. woo.
Tour Stop #21: Today's visit to the Willows cafeteria started off with some game system chatter, but quickly moved into the work-related aspects of Xbox, since Doug was in the house.
Doug did have a fun story about the Nintendo Wii and their faulty wrist-bands -- apparently there's some video floating around of a guy playing a bowling game and the wrist band breaking, slamming the motion wand into his plasma television. Need to find and post that video.
Having never been to the Willows building (which is easy to miss because its detached from all Redmond campus life way out in the hinterlands of Redmond), Mike and I were impressed with the overall vibe of the place, although the cafeteria was not as impressive as some of the others on the main campus. WARNING: Willows is one of
two locations (the other being 41) that practice the pagan art of nuking their boca burgers. It's disgusting, folks. Chewy nuked boca = evil boca. I asked -- nay, demanded (nicely) -- that he throw my boca onto the grill for a couple minutes so that I could get a healthy dose of carcinogens before hitting the road.
As we were wrapping up our visit, it was also nice to see some friendly faces. Christian Matsumori (Product Manager, Casual MCG....whatever that is) and Chad Long (SDET, X Arcade) both passed through and said hello. Plus there were those masks by the front door which Mike and I had to try on for size. Two minutes of pure self-entertainment. Good times.

I'm out. www.buckleyplanet.com
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