Summer of Cake

It's a lazy Friday afternoon, and I feel like indulging in a bit of nostalgia. Come along, won't you?

Ten years ago this summer, I was working for a fledgling e-commerce company. A little over a year before, we had moved from the founder's basement to a small, sparse second-floor space above some stores in Arlington Center--the company needed to start hiring more people, and there wasn't enough room in the basement anymore. Later that year, we took some additional rooms across the hall, and by the summer of 2000 the whole space was full to bursting, with desks and people squeezed into any available nook or corner.

There was a building around the corner that was undergoing a renovation and addition; the company was able to rent space in it, but it would not be available for several more months. At the same time, there was a guy working for us as a technology consultant who had an office near Kendall Square that happened to be unoccupied, so the decision was made to temporarily relocate my department and shuffle some of the other people around until the new office was ready.

In order to save some money, the bosses decided to let us move ourselves, mostly because one guy had a pickup truck. When the moving day arrived near the end of June, it of course started raining just as we finished loading the truck with, you know, expensive computer equipment, files in cardboard boxes, and other perishable stuff. We ended up driving under an unused bank drive-through for shelter until it stopped raining.

But once we got settled into our new space, things were pretty good. For one thing, it was a lot nicer than where we'd been working. The cubicle walls were actual walls, made of wood and plaster, and they were high, so not as much sound carried across them. There were no landline phones, so at first we could be reached only by email. It's amazing how well you can focus when no one can call you or come around the corner and bother you about some petty thing. Later they got us cell phones; the first ones didn't work inside the building, so they returned them and switched carriers.

We would spend Monday mornings at the "mother ship" for meetings, then retreat to our sanctuary. There was a nice kitchen, and the guy whose office it was kept the pantry stocked with all sorts of drinks and snacks and goodies. (I assume he was billing our employer for this.) At peak there were six of us in the department, but often there were only three or four of us in the office on a given day. We had an insanely powerful sound system--something about creating audio recordings for the web site, I think--and on afternoons like today, we'd blast it for hours.

This is how I met A Proper Bostonian, who preferred working from home, so sometimes she was around and sometimes she wasn't, but she always seemed to know when the tech guy had gone shopping and restocked the larder. He always got a cake from the supermarket's bakery, and in later years when we would talk and look back on our time there, she would say, "And we always had cake."

We ended up being temporarily outsourced for a little more than five four months. We moved back to the new office in November, right around Veterans' Day. On February 1st of 2001, I was laid off, along with five or six other people, so I got to work in the new office for less than three months. The company lasted another year before folding.