AND the environment! It’s holding an employee meeting today at Shoreline Amphitheatre. Now, I enjoy a good all-hands employee meeting. I’ve been to a few myself, back in the heyday of the dotcom boom. We even had one at Great America. That was fun. There was this “Mission Impossible” theme (which isn’t as bad as that sounds) and a comedian, oh oh oh, and GUY KAWASAKI as a speaker. THAT kicked ass!!!! But I digress.
So Cisco is having this meeting see. And everyone and their brother have to descend on this place to hear the news and see the sights of whatever Cisco is doing. So what does that mean? Commute HELL!!! I left at my usual time (which I will keep to myself so people don’t throw up when they hear it) and assume I’ll just putt-putt through my usual average 20 minute drive. Listen to some radio, yell at drivers. You know… the usual. But NO. Effing Cisco. It turns into 50 minutes of stop-and-go, not as much yelling because no one could be a crazy driver, not even me, and I’m getting better. Luckily there was an A’s game on. (Shoot, that’ll tip off when I left for work, though I was listening to the pregame when I started and the game was in the 2ND INNING when I got to work)
Aren’t they the company that sells videoconferencing equipment? I’d bet that upwards of 95% of the employees going to this meeting have broadband Internets tubes access. Just use some of your fancy “Unified Communications” doohickys and webcast/simulcast/multicast/stream/write-on-sandwich-boards the thing.
Here are some images that show how much trouble they caused today for those of us who want to improve the economy and the environment (even if we do drive cars everyday to work) Note: these images may not be accurately measured. 🙂
Where they were going – Shoreline Amphitheatre
The not NEARLY wide enough road trying to accomodate all these people
It’s a ways to get to the amphitheatre entrance from Highway 101
A map of how widespread the backup was
A wider shot showing how much of the Bay Area was screwed this morning
How it relates to the size of California
And just for fun. The Earth and the backup
So SPANK YOU very much Cisco for killing the economy. Making everyone around here later for their job. California is the 6th largest economy in the WORLD and I’d guess that our loverly Silicon Valley accounts for a lot of that and we were ALL (not statistically accurate) late. Maybe not as much as the den of sin south of us 🙂 but we’re prolly pretty close. None of us were able to get to our jobs on time. Lost productivity… Lost time we could have used wasting that time at work posting to our blog. And all the extra exhaust fumes too. I bet the air is extra clean today. <cough>
Effers. 🙂
PS – Google Earth KICKS ASS!!!