Halloween in Silicon Valley, Featuring Bouncy Houses and Beer Pong
It's Halloween in Silicon Valley (and presumably everywhere else), which means tech companies are turning their corporate campuses into moderately spookier versions of their normal selves.
Google spared no expense in making their massive Mountain View office park an "Alice In Wonderland"-themed landscape. Admittedly, they did a fine job: elaborate sets for employees to Instagram, bouncy houses for marketing interns to play in, a petting zoo, and actors planted around an after-work party.
They even had a giant Alice statue employees could upskirt:
Not to be outdone by Google, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer threw party earlier this week at the Palo Alto funeral home she purchased for $11.2 million. Keeping with the company spirit, the party's theme was apparently "please just show up."
But Mayer, who apparently
can't do anything right, still managed to piss off her neighbors. In an open letter to Mayer published by Palo Alto Online, one neighbor complained that her bash was "disrespectful" to the dead:
While on-the-surface it seems like using a mortuary is a perfect place to create a haunted experience, it is also a place where many of us said goodbye to our loved ones. The community is small, and the number of funeral homes in the entire bay area can be counted on one hand. Most locals only had one funeral home option, Roller & Hapgood & Tinney. Your neighbors, your community, your friends have had to deal with some of the saddest and hardest experiences in their lives, in the exact spot where you will now be celebrating. Not only is it disrespectful to the memory of our loved ones, it's confusing and upsetting to the community at large who lost their loved ones and grieved there.
From the looks of it, Facebook didn't bother throwing a party. Even so, the holiday was distracting enough that one brogrammer complained that there was a "really low turnout for the monthly #beerpong tournament."
The fact Facebook even has a monthly beer pong tournament is frightening enough.
But even if the social network's Halloween spirit is lacking, we congratulate this Facebook employee for coming up this year's most brutal tech costume: The Ghost of Google+.
To contact the author of this post, please email kevin@valleywag.com.
