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Closing Time At Microsoft's Campus Pub
theodp writes "Just three days before the Spitfire pub was to open on Microsoft's Entertainment & Devices Division campus, TechFlash reports that Microsoft got cold feet and pulled the plug on the project, leaving the bar's owner and his 22 employees in the lurch. 'I am completely stunned and disappointed by the decision,' said now lease-less owner Jonathan Sposato, who's stuck with space built out as a pub, complete with a giant bar, a fireplace, and eight beer taps. (He says it wouldn't be economically viable to refit it as a restaurant.) Microsoft spokesman Lou Gellos confirmed the company's sudden change of heart: 'The goal was always to create a cool gathering place for employees, but to do so in a manner that's consistent with a business environment. We decided we should do something more appropriate, and that meant not having a pub.' The new pub had been in development for more than a year."
The unspoken reality at Microsoft is that there is a large minority of Mormons working in and around Microsoft. While something like caffeinated drinks can be overlooked, something as potent and mind-altering as alcohol is a spit in the face of the Mormon employees.
There is no doubt that some pressure was brought to bear against management when this pub was announced, and though it hasn't been publicized, the Washington state Mormon leaders have been visiting the campus to lobby against the pub.
It sucks for the people who own and work at the pub, but in a silently ultra-religious state like WA, it's no surprise that on of the largest local employers bows to the commands of the puppet masters.
No this is AMERICA....
Whereas in Europe you can head over to a pub to relax and chit chat, in AMERICA (and English Canada) it is completely frowned upon.
I know whenever I am stateside and I order a beer I am completely out of the norm!
BUT yet when it comes to drinking while I sip my beer the others get piss drunk, do idiotic things, and generally make a complete a** out of themselves.
This begs the question, is the pub the problem? Or the fact that the culture in this respect has its head up its a**.
BTW I am European, grew up in North America, but now have been living in Europe for 15 years. And while Europeans have their oddities, this aspect of English North American life is really screwed...
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
Boy if this isn't Office Space and every boneheaded corporate move ever in a nutshell. Hey let's do something nice for out employees, they're adults who will enjoy this and can have a beer without getting completely drunk and making asses of themselves at work (or we'll fire them, that's fair). Then a lawyer takes a look at it, says you know this looks like it might be fun and actionable, and god knows we don't have any money - better cancel it.
So you end up five times worse than never even having planned it in the first place, because you got everyone's hopes up and now you look like stupid jackasses. But your asses are covered, so all is right with the world! And this is why we pay all you stupid CEOs and MBAs the big bucks, to be dithering asswipes who lead by windsock.
My boss got fired after he walked past his secretary and she smelled alcohol on his breath and reported that as sexual harassment. From beer. His friends took him out for his birthday during lunch.
The company didn't want to chance it. So welcome to America. Home of the free (to sue for every stupid little thing).
Perhaps this was what MS thought about. Personally, I think America has a relationship with alcohol that's beyond fucked up. Ever notice how the bars in some states (I hesitate to say all) have no windows/small windows and then with the shades pulled down? Welcome to the land where the Puritans settled. And no, those attitudes never went away completely.
A lot of people in Europe won't admit that the UK is in Europe and a lot of people in the UK claim not to be part of Europe so it's not really fair to paint all of Europe with the same brush.
One of the nastiest bits of code that I wrote after a four rather strong beer lunch. It was in the early days of graphics when we had a DEC VT11, vector graphic display where we had to draw the screen within the phosphor decay time so it didn't flicker. Typically you would have a sequence of instructions for the graphic controller and then you interrupted the CPU which would do cleverer things. The problem was that every cycle spend in the interrupt code, the phosphor was decaying and it limited the number of things we could draw as the CPU was involved every time we drew a new component on the screen.
In the pub, I just thought "Sod it" and shaved a few cycles by having self modifying code. Ugly as hell and hard to maintain but it meant we could display more on the screen.
See my journal, I write things there
Time was when England exiled their most violent felons to an island continent penal colony half a world away. Over time the definition for "violent felon" slid from rapist and murderer to pirate, then to treasonous conspirator, and so on until they landed at political dissident. For many years they exported these folk, only to discover later that this was their best and brightest; their free thinkers, their engineers artists and inventors, the folk who were brighter than their superiors. And what were left were Lords and serfs.
So now Australia breeds a more vital breed of men, having been selected from that filter, and England has lost control of them.
Such is as it is with Microsoft. Microsoft has bought into the theory that the top 20% of workers contribute 80% of the work that they've lost sight of how fungible those metrics are. Their 20%ers are folk who threaten the established structure, who are smarter than their bosses, who have scary ideas. It's only right that they migrate from there to Google. Google is Microsoft's Australia.
And no, I've never worked for Microsoft or Google and I still don't and I doubt that I would barring dire circumstance or rude incentive.
Help stamp out iliturcy.