At Google -- makers of the search engine so popular it's become a verb -- work is 24/7. So the company ladles on the perks to keep employees, like Minnie Ingersoll, happy. Ingersoll, a 26-year-old product manager in Google's advertising department in Mountain View, California (and a 2002 Harvard B-school grad), liaisons between Google's advertisers and its finance and engineering departments. We caught up with Ingersoll on her cell phone as she raced through a typical work week.
Friday, 10:55 a.m.
"I got here at 8 a.m. today -- I never, ever get here that early. So far I've had meetings at 8 a.m., 9 a.m., and 10 a.m., and now I'm headed to my 11 a.m. and trying to avoid the donut table along the way. My 11 a.m. is going to discuss fraudsters (yes, we actually call them fraudsters): Stolen credit cards and that sort of thing. I've got the world's top payment expert and I'm trying to glean information from him so we'll be in sync with what Amazon and Yahoo! are doing. The rest of my day? I have no idea. I never look at my calendar more than five minutes in advance."
Friday, 2:01p.m.
"Right now I'm hiding in the conference room with my laptop, eating lunch with the blinds closed. I slipped out to grab a little sanity and catch up on work. I'm having hot-and-sour soup and some salad. They make it for us -- we have the most awesome chefs in the world. We had ostrich last night."
"I had an exciting moment today. As billing product manager I go to lots of meetings with the CFO, and today he asked me to come to his office for a one-on-one. I felt like a kid going to the principal's office, like I had done something wrong, but he just wanted to know how I see my role, what I'm working on, what my priorities are. It wasn't that stressful."
Monday, 2:41p.m.
"I just finished a conference call that I took while having a foot spa treatment at my nail salon. I was the VIP guest speaker at a regional sales meeting. I had to talk about billing and reporting and try to not say things like 'Oh, that tickles.'"
Tuesday, 4:06 p.m.
"Today there's a big offsite meeting where all the executives go somewhere to discuss their visions of the future, so the rest of us can stay here and actually get some work done. I just got back from a big jog around some stinky swamplands. They're beautiful, but they smell really bad. In the building I'm in now, I don't have an office, but I spend all my time here. We're so cramped for space that I keep my equipment in my gym locker -- the power cord for my laptop, ethernet cables, and my tennis shoes."
Wednesday, 11:03 a.m.
"You've caught me on my scooter. Google has loaner scooters in the lobby; you just borrow one and ride it to the next building. It makes a huge difference if you've got back-to-back meetings in different buildings. Now I've got my 11:oo -- something about traditional ad agencies. I have no idea what it's about; somebody put it on my schedule, and I agreed to go."
Wednesday, 6:12 p.m.
"I just got out of that meeting about agency support and ad rates. We want to improve ad quality (duh), and we talked about why. I nodded my head a lot and IM'd friends doubletime on my laptop.
"Tonight my totally-crazy-manic-depressive-having-a-nervous-breakdown friend from business school is joining me for dinner, then we're gonna carpool home around 8. I keep in good touch with all my business school friends because Google's always hiring, but all my friends have been rejected. We're not a very MBA-heavy company."
Thursday, 12:36 p.m. "I just got out of a product manager's meeting run by Larry Page, one of our founders. He likes to blue-sky about what the next five years hold for Google, how we're treating our customers, things like that. These meetings always reassure me that Google is trying to do what's best for its customers and isn't just out to make money.
"My role is to interface between what customers need and what the engineers can build, identify the points of pain, and make sure engineering understands what the market is and what its needs are. What I accomplish in meetings is helping customers phrase their problems in ways that have a solution.
"You know, no one believes I'm talking to a reporter. Last night in my meeting I said, 'I'm talking to a reporter.' They're all like, 'Whatever. You are not.'"
