Thread drift:
in spring 2003 I applied for a position at a start-up called Laszlo Systems.
Their main HQ was in San Francisco, where about 25 people worked, but there was
a group of 5 or so people working out of a satellite office in Boston. I did
well enough on the Boston interview that they decided to fly me out to San
Francisco to be interviewed by the engineering team there.
So I arrived 9:00 at the address given, 1040 Mariposa Street. To my dismay, it
was an unmarked steel door in the side of a wall in an industrial neighborhood.
I thought I had the wrong place. But it was the right place; behind the door
was a former auto-body shop that had been converted into an engineering
workspace. (I do my part to keep up the start-up mythos; Laszlo was the second
startup I've worked for that was literally in a garage -- like Apple,
Hewlett-Packard, and many before them). So anyway, I go in & I get grilled by
a bunch of people for a few hours, right through lunchtime, & then around 2PM
it's announced that the whole company is taking off the rest of the afternoon
off & walking a few blocks down the road to take a tour of Anchor Steam. I am
invited to join them. So I do. We take the tour & then sample each of about a
dozen beers. Because I was interviewing for a job that I really wanted &
needed, I was trying to stay sober & professional. But that proved to be very
challenging. I said to the VP Engineering, "if you don't give me the job after
doing this to me, I think that will be very mean." I flew home & two days
later I got the job. Worked for them for 5 years, until the company melted
away in the great 2007-2008 financial melt-down.
But the main point is, that brewery tour is really worth taking. Especially fun
is when the tour guide answers questions about how Anchor Steam stayed in
business during the Prohibition years. . .;^) ("Our records from that period
are a little murky. . .")
During that same trip I took a "personal" day & went to the O'Reilly "emerging
technology" conference & Santa Clara & sold my books from a table in the lobby.
Creative Commons was introduced to the world at that conference; Cory Doctorow
released his new book Down & Out in the Magic Kingdom under that license. So I
was chatting with him & a few others at some point & they prevailed upon me to
release my books for free under Creative Commons too. So I did, making me (I
believe; not entirely certain about this) the second novelist to adopt CC.
All these associations spring to mind when I hear or read the words "tour of
Anchor Steam Brewery".
jrs
On Sep 27, 2014, at 5:17 AM, Danese Cooper wrote:
> I can arrange a tour for you of Anchor
> Steam Brewery (the original craft beer renaissance mecca in North America).
