With my first grownup paycheck freshly deposited, an iced vanilla latte still dripping with condensation, and a delicious turkey/avo sandwich waiting to be eaten, my sister and I headed off to Shoreline Amphitheater in Mountain View for the Jason Aldean & Luke Bryan concert. My sister's friend was also with us, and along with our sandwiches we were all accidentally matching in lace country-girl dresses and of course, our adorable cowboy boots. (Any excuse to wear them, we WILL.)
We turned on the playlist of the headliner we would be seeing later that night and hit the road, assuming that leaving two hours early would be plenty of time to go 30 miles down the freeway. 15 miles later, we realized how wrong we were. We sat in traffic for 2 hours and finally decided that as soon as we got off the freeway, we would park on a random side street and walk the remaining 1 mile to the venue. Smart, right? At 7:40, we parked. We taunted cars on our walk there, reminding them that we would be getting there first even though they are in automobiles. But again, thou shall hold thy tongue.
When we made it to the theater 15 minutes later, my feet were already starting to hurt. It turned out my boots were actually not made for walking, and now we faced a crowd of around 2,000 people trying to get into a concert that started 20 minutes ago. Obviously the theater staff had prepared for this turnout right? They have some sort of clicker on the number of tickets that had been sold, right? They would certainly invest in line-barriers so that people line up humanely instead of pushing everyone into the backs of those in front of them, right? The 6 people scanning tickets and the 3 people patting every single person down indicated-- no. They had not prepared. It was madness. The additional treat was that among the madness, everyone was sober which meant everyone was acting cordially and not at all irritating! .......... After another hour of getting way too familiar with the people around me, we got to the front of the line (Space Mountain wasn't even at the end. Lame.) At 8:45, we got to the concert in time to see Luke Bryan's final 2 songs.
It was now that I began to take particular notice in my Twilight Zone predicament. Did I just spend 3 hours in traffic lines and chaos? Yes. Is that beer stand charging 10 dollars for Coors Light? Yes. And are people lining up for a half-mile to spend that money? Yes. Does that man have a beer box shaped like a cowboy hat on his head? Yes. And is anyone around me aware of their surroundings or likely to remember this night? No. (Insert Twilight Zone theme song here.)
The concert went on, two more of my sister's friends joined us, we saw all of Jason Aldean, and were able to walk away with only 1 beverage having been spilled on our stuff. Leaving the theatre was smooth compared to the rest of the night-- let the cow-herding begin. We followed the crowd for a while, remembering that we had parked exactly 1.2 miles away, and would need to walk straight for quite a ways before being concerned about the particulars of where the car was.
Mountain View is known to many other people as the home of Google's headquarters. Word on the street was that Google was practically the Disneyland of workplaces: bocce ball and volleyball courts, soccer fields, hundreds of restaurants where food is free, slides instead of stairs, exercise balls instead of chairs at desks, ...wait why am I not working for Google again? Anyway, the point is that the aforementioned side street we had chosen to park on was within Google's buildings. It was our remember-where-we-parked road sign indicator. "A street that starts with 'L' and 'at Google'. Easy enough!" (Seriously with the tongue-holding. Try it.)
It didn't take long to realize just how lost we were. Thank goodness for iPhones, which ironically had headquarters about 5 miles from where we were, and for Google maps, which ironically was leading us through its mothership's own labyrinth. This morning I looked up the satellite view of the Google spiderweb. Please note that every building in this map is labeled "Google". The ampitheater and the street-that-starts-with-L are indicated with the red dots. The green dot indicates where we were when we realized we didn't know where we were. The up-side of our being lost was confirming that Google is, in fact, awesome.
My boots had long since been taken off, and I was walking barefoot through the streets of Google (it really may as well be its own town.) My feet were pretty reluctant to continue this excursion, so I hailed a taxi-- this is something I became used to doing while living in Europe; when all else fails, hail a taxi. The 45 seconds that followed once we were in the car went something like this:
"Charleston and Landings please."
"Johnson?"
"No. Charleston. Google? The main street Google is on? It's a few blocks from here? Charleston."
"Johnson and Landings?"
"You need to turn right here."
"Okay. Then Johnson."
"No. Not Johnson. Charleston. And Landings."
"Okay where do I go next?"
"You know what, can we just get out?"
"Get out."
So we got out of the car in the middle of the street in traffic. Insert Twilight Zone theme song here.
Hopelessly lost, we started wandering through the more inner courtyards of Google only to find that among their other awesome amenities, there seemed to be multi-Google-colored beach cruisers everywhere. They were not locked up to anything and were adorned with baskets containing a placard that read "Attention: GBikes are less likely to be stolen when parked near a Google building." Perhaps you see where this story is going. It didn't take long for the five of us to hop on a bike, and proceed in our mission to find our car. It only took about 10 minutes. We parked our GBikes safely in the confines of a Google courtyard, next to the Bocce courts, and patted them on the seat for a job well done. At 1:10am, we finally made it home.
This morning my feet are torn to shreds, so I'm not in any hurry to go anywhere and therefore had time to write this whole rant. I won't be going to a country concert again any time soon. I will, however, make it a priority to apply to Google at some point in my life. (And to the Google trackers that run this blog in the first place, please don't ban me from your products. I am purely grateful for your human resource department's brilliant minds.)
No comments:
Post a Comment