05.27.06
company perks
Google is famous for its perks, and rightfully so. They have the best perks of any place I’ve ever worked, even better than SGI in its heyday. It seems like Google really wants to eliminate anything that might distract people from doing great things.
It’s also possible that they just want to be nice to their employees, and I found an argument for that: heated toilet seats.
While I haven’t done a rigorous statistical analysis to determine distribution, almost all of the toilets at the Googleplex that I have sampled are high-tech megafunction toilets: the kind that can spray your privates clean and then blow them dry.
The first time I walked into a stall, I rolled my eyes at how over-the-top the toilet was. I mean, how necessary is it to have megafunction toilets?
Then I sat down and discovered the seat was heated, and to my surprise, I found that I had a very visceral response. It was comforting. I suspect that the seat is set to body temperature, and I bet that I have very strong associations of comfort attached to body heat on my butt. I wanted to just sit on that nice warm seat for hours. This argues against the perks being there to improve productivity.
I haven’t tried the toilets’ wash and dry cycle yet — I’m afraid to. After all, I do need to get some work done.
