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sixteen-inch metal fans vibrated and vainly pushed back against the heat seeping out from the racks around us—their feeble force doing little more than raise the temperature of Inktomi's adjacent cage by a few degrees.
    We went to work. First the ops team attached Panduit cable troughs to the sides of the cabinets with adhesive tape. Then we began gently placing the free-hanging cables in the troughs and twist-tying them together so they no longer draped over the face of the machines like the bangs of a Harajuku Girl.
    I tackled the rack labeled "U." It has long since been retired, but I like to think that those user queries routed to U got their answers a nanosecond or two faster because of my careful combing of the cables.
    Why, you might ask, did Google do things this way? In addition to the efficiency gained by running cheap, redundant servers, Google was exploiting a loophole in the laws of co-lo economics. Exodus, like most hosting centers, charged tenants by the square foot. So Inktomi paid the same amount for hosting fifty servers as Google paid for hosting fifteen hundred. And the kicker? Power, which becomes surprisingly expensive when you gulp enough to light a neighborhood, was included in the rent. When Urs renegotiated the lease with Exodus, Jim spelled out exactly how much power he needed. Not the eight twenty-amp circuits normally allocated to a cage the size of Google's; he wanted fifty-six.
    "You just want that in case there's a spike, right?" asked the Exodus sales rep with a look of surprise. "There's no way you really need that much power for a cage that size."
    "No," Jim told him. "I really need all fifty-six to run our machines."
    It's rumored that at one point Google's power consumption exceeded Exodus's projections fifty times over. * It didn't help that Google sometimes started all of its machines at once, which blew circuit breakers left and right until Google instituted five-second delays to keep from burning down the house.
    Air-conditioning came standard, too. Again, Exodus based their calculations on a reasonability curve. No reasonable company would cram fifteen hundred micro-blast furnaces into a single cage, because that would require installing a separate A/C unit. Google did. We were a high-maintenance client.
    CableFest '99 was the one and only time I entered a Google data center. It gave me an appreciation of the magnitude of what we were building and how differently we were doing it. I can't say it inspired confidence to lay my untrained hands on our cheap little generic servers, lying open to the controlled elements on crumbly corkboards, while next door, Inktomi's high priests tended to sleek state-of-the-art machines that loomed like the Death Star. But the arrangement seemed to work pretty well for us, and I decided not to worry about things that were beyond my ken.
    Very smart people were obsessing about the viability of Google's back end, and unbeknownst to me, I would soon be obsessing about the viability of my own.

Meet the Marketers
     
    "Once she had accomplished that," Cindy was explaining to our small marketing team, "she had the world by its oyster."
    I smiled. New fodder for the quote board I'd pinned up on my cubicle wall, which still featured Cindy's last pronouncement, "That's what happens when that happens."
    Our department consisted of a small cadre with mixed levels of experience in marketing. Cindy was the boss and acting VP. She was close to my age, very funny (usually intentionally), and always in a hurry, which led to an alarming number of emails in which her fingers failed to keep up with her thoughts. She had started as a print journalist, then done PR duty under some of the most notorious tycoons in the Valley, where she had become personally acquainted with every reporter who talked or typed about technology. She focused on public relations, which Larry and Sergey supported as the most cost-effective way to promote the company.
    Cindy exuded a wholesome