Japanese massage chairs, scooter parking in the corridors, a room dedicated to lego and a plethora of purple lava lamps. It can only be the self-conscious wackiness of Google, which had an open day at its New York office this week.
Holding court in the cafeteria was the internet company's director of technology, Craig Silverstein, who was the very first employee hired by founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin while Google was still a university dorm-room project back in 1998. Silverstein, who is now worth well over $100m, is about as close to God as you can get in Silicon Valley's intelligentsia. So what does he think of the hype surrounding Facebook, which is now touted to be worth more than $10bn?
A Harvard graduate, Silverstein jokily suggested that it he'd been at the university at the right time he could have cosied up to Facebook's founder, Mark Zuckerberg: "I only wish I'd been at Harvard five years later then I could have been a part of this thing." Politely rebuffing questions about the possibility of Google buying into Facebook, he professed guarded admiration for social networking sites but pointed out that Google had its own [albeit far lower profile] venture, Orkut.
The subject abruptly turned to Google's apparent plan to lay an underwater cable under the Pacific and to build a space elevator taking travellers to the moon. According to Silverstein, these can be constructed from nanotubes. He wasn't kidding.
A former Port Authority truck depot, Google's base in the Big Apple opened a year ago and now houses 700 staff. An inflatable bear lurks by the front door with a sign reminding employees of the firm's "Don't be evil" motto. The place is full of organic micro-kitchens (apparently Google's founders have decreed that everybody should be within 150 feet of caffeine and food) with guest chefs dispensing trendy variations on sushi.
The carpets are made from 40% recycled materials and the layout is mapped according to the geography of Manhattan - Inwood is at one end of the building and Wall Street is at the other, with Central Park, the Empire State Building and every other possible landmark denoting meeting rooms in between. Laundry, language classes and yoga are all on offer for employees who, according to the company, typically don't have set hours "as long as they get their work done". There's a museum of ancient computers and a whiteboard carrying greetings in every possible language - including Elven from Lord of the Rings. In the lego room, there's a scale model of the building.
My guide, Google product manager Dominic Preuss, explained: "There was an engineer who needed some time out to cool down his brain. So he sat down and built it."
By hosting the fourth estate, Google was trying hard to impress. But with 14,000 employees, the $180bn company has its fair share of enemies these days who feel it is becoming a megolith as mighty as Microsoft. One gossip website, Gawker, duly accused the company of having smelly offices while the Valleywag blog aimed its sites at the "hideous" fashion sense displayed by Google staff. As for the products on display, the company adopted a theme of "stages of life".
Already far beyond a simple online search specialist, Google has been emphasising its applications to help people organise their lives. There are tools for creating baby blogs and family diaries, there's a travel organiser and a fitness web which keeps track of how many of the eight recommended daily glasses of water you've drunk. The firm's Picasa photo organiser is supposed to be idiot-proof and Google's calendars allow people to search for public events around the world .
It's all a huge, impressive operation intended to suck people in to using Google's search page to find everything in life - and to browse its cash-generating advertisements. But enough of this now, I feel an urge to reinvigorate my brain with some lego.
