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Comment by scottyallen | Hacker News Reader

The vending machine isn't quite what the article makes it out to be. For starters, it's one vending machine in all of Google (as far as I know).

It magically appeared one April Fool's day, and has been attributed to some of the SREs in charge of keeping web search running, but credit has never been claimed. There was a rather funny "I am spartacus" thread about the vending machine that appeared on a major email list after one of the facilities or kitchen management asked who was responsible, ostensibly so they could congratulate them.

I no longer work at Google (though I used to work downstairs from the vending machine), so it's awesome to hear it's still up and running and being stocked. I believe, at least for a while, facilities/cafe staff were officially condoning it if not restocking it. Definitely one of the more clever pranks I saw around campus.

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Does Google have a culture of pranks/hacks? It certainly makes sense, but I've never really heard anything about it

Yes, some places more than others, though. It's not highly generally highly publicized.

That is, other than the "offical" April Fool's jokes. Googlers LOVE April Fool's day, and there's generally a solid handful of nonpublic April Fool's day jokes on campus.

But there's also just random pranks. Some I'm aware of:

- Everyone's photos on the internal people database (available on an internal website) showed up with either crazy sunglasses or mustaches. Someone, probably a vision researcher, used facial recognition to do in bulk.

- Eric's picture had a photo on the wall behind him, and the photo was very subtly swapped with a picture of Bill Gates.

- There was a long series of pranks having to do with pink plastic flamingos and the T-Rex skeleton in Mountain View that were quite funny, though I forgot the full sequence. It had to do with T-Rex being surrounded by pink flamingos, then someone changed it to flamingos attacking T-Rex, then someone else brought a giant can of "flamingo bait", and all the flamingos were lying dead around T-Rex. It unfolded over a week or two, with it changing every few days.

- I was on a team that pranked each other whenever someone went on vacation. The most memorable of which involved filling a 12'x12'x8' glass walled office from floor to ceiling with pink balloons: http://www.menalto.com/photos/miscellaneous/google/Pranks/20...

Couple other recent ones:

- For April Fools day this year, the internal corp login page rick-rolled everyone.

- Larry Page has this crusade to make meetings more efficient, so all around campus are these posters that say things like "All meetings should have a single decider" or "Meetings should not have more than 10 people". Well, soon after, a bunch of posters appeared saying motivational things like "You're building the future. Make it awesome." I couldn't tell if this was a very subtle troll or a well-intentioned but ultimately condescending attempt at motivating people, but in either case, the response is the same: troll harder. So with a couple friends, we put up posters that said things like "Read slogans", "You will do whatever this poster says", or "All meetings require a unicorn and a pony." Well, sure enough, after a couple days another round of posters went up that said things like "Red" (on a yellow poster) or similar absurdities. Then a day or so after that, another round of posters went up with "The posters will continue until morale improves."

- (I was on the same team as Scotty, but a couple years later, so we didn't overlap except socially.) When we got back from a team retreat in Pittsburgh, our work area was all cordoned off with police tape, with all the furniture turned upside down, courtesy of the people who hadn't gone.

Gmail is an ongoing April fool's prank.

Also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Googles_hoaxes

I'd say so. The most recent which I am aware of was the nyan cat youtube video had a nyan cat progress bar. http://venturebeat.com/2011/06/17/youtube-nyan-cat-progress-...

Still, it sounds a lot better than some of the 'healthy eating' vending machine gimmicks. Most (in)famously, in my area, are the ones that introduced the "heart smart" stickers by raising the price of unhealthy foods by 50% and raising the price of healthy foods by 25%. I guess in some sick, twisted way that's a "discount on healthy foods" but it wasn't very useful. Since everyone knew the machines would rip you off regardless of what you chose, they just bought their candy bars elsewhere.

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