Incase you missed it… The little company I was working for, Mailblocks, was bought by AOL. We’ve actually all been moved over to the Mountain View campus for a couple weeks now. And well… it’s interesting.
First of all, it’s pretty strange being in a big company again. We went from 16 people to what, 14k? It’s fucking gigantic. And I’ll be damned if I still don’t even know a soul outside of our group. But, hey… there’s an espresso machine in the lunch room of our building (I’m now known as the official mailblocks barista).
It’s strange though… we went from being a small scrappy little company with big dreams to conquer the world (hey, our mission statement had both “perverts” and “BladeRunner” in it), to a company who’s sole focus is marketing to the masses, and selling “content”. Which, I guess, isn’t so bad… but just hard to get used to.
But then there’s my mail.
I swear to god, it’s fucking killing me.
Not only am I given some schmuck address like barclayloftus42@aol.com* which might as well have been restlessinmoutainview3373@aol.com. I’ll never give anyone this email address. It’s just embarrassing. (couldn’t they at least have created a @corp.aol.com, or something?)
But the worst part is that for some reason, shortly after the time-warner deal, in an effort to “eat-their-own-dog-food,” they decided to standardize everyone on the AOL mail client.
Yeah, the one that you use with the AOL client.
Yeah, the one that deletes(!) mail after 7 days.
To make matters even more fun, they also gave me this little RSA dongle-key-thing that spits out random numbers every 15 seconds. This is part of my login process. Without it, I can’t check email.
I’m not sure where this initiative came from, but god is it killing me. I don’t understand how a company can run without email. I see it as the most crucial part in business communication… but I guess here it’s turned into a hybrid IM/phone for anything important… it has for me anyway.
Anyway enough ranting. I’m going to go make a latte.
*It’s not really 42, but some other 2-digit number.