<div style='font: 10pt ; text-align: left; '>I wake up in the mornings at eight, but since my job starts at ten and I live five minutes from work I usually have an hour to play videogames or go to the park and play tennis before work starts.
I go to work at ten and am doing something I enjoy, so I don't really mind work at all. Being a successful startup in the videogame industry the place is so relaxed, laid-back, and fun that it's really mindblowing. People bouncing on giant bounce-balls down the hallway, stuff like that. Yesterday my boss bought all ten or so of us in my department remote-control cars so the morning was filled with the sounds of RC vehicles buzzing down the hallways. It's not an everyday occurrence, it was more of a holiday thing, but it's still a good example of the company culture. We're the only company I know of that in addition to making us sign a non-harassment policy for the Internet we also have to sign a paper saying we won't sue JAMDAT for anything offensive we're exposed to - so my co-worker's cube across from mine has the Drawn Together screensaver running on it. Despite all of this though we seem to really be very productive and JAMDAT was one of the hottest IPOs in the tech sector last quarter.
I have mind-blowing opportunities: I've been officially hired full-time for about three and a half months and unbelievably I've been given the chance and taken the initiative to be a lead on what some of my friends and I think is going to be a tremendous and important companywide project...to be working on that for a multinational game company is just really exciting. Also I'm being paid very well, which since I am not a college graduate is really an unbelievable stroke of good fortune. However people in this particular industry (wireless entertainment BREW developers) are making quite a bit more on average, with or without a degree, and my friend who just bailed from the company to make a ridiculous amount of money a year at the age of twenty-four as an independent contractor said he could probably get me an interview with one of the companies that's paying higher, not that I want it. (Personally I think the industry's kind of in a gold rush right now and I get flashbacks to the dot-com era, and I think JAMDAT is probably one of the few companies with a real shot at success, but the extra money floating around is sort of nice for the time being.)
So I get off work at seven and go home and can play videogames, listen to music, practice guitar, until about one in the morning.
For the last two years I had almost no friends. Now I play Texas Hold'em with people I met at work every Thursday, and at the company party I was talking to someone about Terry Gilliam movies and have the chance to go over to he and his roommates' apartment and geek out on wacky intellectual stuff and videogames and may have the chance to do stuff I like with people who like it as much as I do. I've never been part of real geek culture before except for a little bit at Stanford and it's really great. Besides that my company is filled with twentysomethings of all types and there is quite a bit of young-people-oriented stimulus I have the chance to partake in.
I have no real responsibilities other than work and rent, cell phone bill, paying off student loans, etc. etc. It's fucking great.
And the people I'm meeting at this company are an exercise in world experience. We (me, this girl I know, and the friend I was talking to about Terry Gilliam) were talking at the company party about how I could join them with this guy who's does swordplay practice with wooden swords and stuff on off-hours. Somehow we started talking to one of the older guys who works upstairs, a short chubby stocky Asian guy in a suit jacket and tailored pants about how he shoots guns for a hobby. He has many guns, among them a .50 caliber rifle and an AK-47 which somehow he bought "before the ban". I swear I felt a little like I in Goldeneye 007 talking to a Chinese arms dealer or something. It was really amazing.
Life can always get better, but if someone outside were describing a life of basically having it be my job to work on fun and live fun outside of work with not much really in the way of it, I'd have to say it sounded a little bit like heaven. It may not be completely, but in a way it kind of is. :)</div>
I go to work at ten and am doing something I enjoy, so I don't really mind work at all. Being a successful startup in the videogame industry the place is so relaxed, laid-back, and fun that it's really mindblowing. People bouncing on giant bounce-balls down the hallway, stuff like that. Yesterday my boss bought all ten or so of us in my department remote-control cars so the morning was filled with the sounds of RC vehicles buzzing down the hallways. It's not an everyday occurrence, it was more of a holiday thing, but it's still a good example of the company culture. We're the only company I know of that in addition to making us sign a non-harassment policy for the Internet we also have to sign a paper saying we won't sue JAMDAT for anything offensive we're exposed to - so my co-worker's cube across from mine has the Drawn Together screensaver running on it. Despite all of this though we seem to really be very productive and JAMDAT was one of the hottest IPOs in the tech sector last quarter.
I have mind-blowing opportunities: I've been officially hired full-time for about three and a half months and unbelievably I've been given the chance and taken the initiative to be a lead on what some of my friends and I think is going to be a tremendous and important companywide project...to be working on that for a multinational game company is just really exciting. Also I'm being paid very well, which since I am not a college graduate is really an unbelievable stroke of good fortune. However people in this particular industry (wireless entertainment BREW developers) are making quite a bit more on average, with or without a degree, and my friend who just bailed from the company to make a ridiculous amount of money a year at the age of twenty-four as an independent contractor said he could probably get me an interview with one of the companies that's paying higher, not that I want it. (Personally I think the industry's kind of in a gold rush right now and I get flashbacks to the dot-com era, and I think JAMDAT is probably one of the few companies with a real shot at success, but the extra money floating around is sort of nice for the time being.)
So I get off work at seven and go home and can play videogames, listen to music, practice guitar, until about one in the morning.
For the last two years I had almost no friends. Now I play Texas Hold'em with people I met at work every Thursday, and at the company party I was talking to someone about Terry Gilliam movies and have the chance to go over to he and his roommates' apartment and geek out on wacky intellectual stuff and videogames and may have the chance to do stuff I like with people who like it as much as I do. I've never been part of real geek culture before except for a little bit at Stanford and it's really great. Besides that my company is filled with twentysomethings of all types and there is quite a bit of young-people-oriented stimulus I have the chance to partake in.
I have no real responsibilities other than work and rent, cell phone bill, paying off student loans, etc. etc. It's fucking great.
And the people I'm meeting at this company are an exercise in world experience. We (me, this girl I know, and the friend I was talking to about Terry Gilliam) were talking at the company party about how I could join them with this guy who's does swordplay practice with wooden swords and stuff on off-hours. Somehow we started talking to one of the older guys who works upstairs, a short chubby stocky Asian guy in a suit jacket and tailored pants about how he shoots guns for a hobby. He has many guns, among them a .50 caliber rifle and an AK-47 which somehow he bought "before the ban". I swear I felt a little like I in Goldeneye 007 talking to a Chinese arms dealer or something. It was really amazing.
Life can always get better, but if someone outside were describing a life of basically having it be my job to work on fun and live fun outside of work with not much really in the way of it, I'd have to say it sounded a little bit like heaven. It may not be completely, but in a way it kind of is. :)</div>
