One of the things I miss most about the office are the microkitchens. Facebook and Google both have fantastic selections of yummy snacks to fuel folks through the day. It's actually quite great for adhoc conversations and just getting away from your desk for a bit. I've tried to replicate this by purchasing a box of Funyuns from Amazon to keep at home, but it's just not the same. As I'm... you know... pathetically eating my Funyuns at home on my own with my shorts on.

At Google, the microkitchens were legendary when I started in 2008. But by the time I left in 2019, they had changed a lot. The stock was intentionally kept low, and the snacks were healthier. This wasn't always a popular thing. For a period of about 3 years or so, the snack selection, which used to rotate fairly regularly, was frozen in time with the same set of things. I think this was due to Google trying to plan the future of the microkitchen program, and it just took a while. Or something like that. Anyway, this fallow period was great if you were the world's biggest fan of French Onion SunChips.

At some point in 2016, I was asked, perhaps because of my infamous love of snacky goodness, or probably for some other random reason, to organize a snack tasting party for people on my floor in building 43. Facilities sent me a gigantic box of snacks, and we had to very scientifically. Like, very scientifically, try out the snacks and give feedback about which things we liked. Based on the feedback from similar parties like this all over the campus, they rotated the microkitchen snacks after a long period of way too many French Onion SunChips.

So in this, incredibly serious business meeting, we're eating as much as we can. For science.

(Sorry for the blurry image, I was probably eating something)

It was pretty obvious which were the unpopular snacks, since they remained in the big box from facilities outside my desk for several weeks despite my urgent pleas to the mailing list for the floor of my building to please come and eat them.