I arrived at the Microsoft campus this morning at about 10:30.

Immediately upon my arrival, I was stripped naked, cavity-searched, and interrogated. My blood was replaced with a synthetic compound that would blow me sky-high if I attempted to leave the premises without permission, my bags were checked for penguin feathers, and one side of my skull was removed for placement of my temporary borg headgear.

A quick systems check was run by a technician after my borg unit was wired up.

Technician: Rory - How many fingers am I holding up?

Me: I HAVE BEEN ASSIMILATED.

Technician: Good. Everything seems to be in order. Have fun, and please remember to have your original personality restored at the reception desk before leaving.

With that, I went into a room and waited. It was, you might say, a waiting room.

After a few minutes, Shawn Morrissey came out to greet me. We exchanged pleasantries and then headed for the deeper, darker recesses of building 5.

Out of the waiting room, we stepped into an airlock. I thought the airlock was a little over the top, but figured that Microsoft knew best, so I just went along with it.

The door behind us clanked shut, and my ears popped as the air pressure in the room changed. Some vents in the ceiling opened, and I heard a faint hissing noise.

Looking up, I saw a red mist swirling below the ceiling, corkscrewing, and drooping in little wisps. I felt confused, but figured that it was only because one hemisphere of my brain had been removed in order to accommodate the borg unit.

A few seconds later, I caught a sweet smell in the olfactory glands and a tingly sensation on my tongue. It smacked of tropical punch, with perhaps just a little too much sugar.

The taste was familiar. It reminded me of some far off childhood - summers on a tire-swing, baseball at the park, and other simple pleasures. There was a common thread woven through all these events, and it had to do with this taste. This sweet, sugary, tropical-punchity flavor... It tasted like.. like...

So, I thought to myself, Microsoft has finally figured out how to create an airborne Kool-Aid. This is an unexpected turn of events. I wonder what else these engineers of mayhem have in store for me. What, indeed...

Properly searched, borgged, and gassed, Shawn led me through a door at the other end of the airlock. On the other side, he stopped for a moment and looked at me.

"We're not in Kansas anymore," he said with a cocked eyebrow, obviously enjoying my bewilderment.

"I've never been to Kansas," I replied. "I've heard it sucks."

"Oh. Well, you should really go there sometime. It's not as bad as everybody makes it out to be."

"Will do, Shawn. Will do."

Before leaving for Microsoft, I drank about two gallons of frothy mochafrappuccinolattemachiatto. The pressure on my bladder following three hours of sitting in the car while enjoying a non-stop caffeine-induced seizure was enough to prompt me to stop by the restroom before getting down to business.

Ladies and Gentlemen - I can tell you without any hesitation whatsoever that the bathrooms in building 5 are, perhaps, the most OCD-friendly bathrooms ever constructed.

Here's the clincher: They did it without any infra-red sensor based auto-flushers.

What's the trick, then? Simple: The normal design for a bathroom door is, while exiting, for it to swing in - you have to pull it. The ones in building 5, on the other hand, swing out - you can just push them with your shoe, meaning that you don't have to construct some elaborate paper-towel mitten for yourself with which to grip the door handle. You just push.

Push, push, push! It's great.

Aside from a strange sort of BO smell, I give the building 5 bathrooms very high marks. MS obviously hasn't turned a blind-eye to the 0.000043% of the population that's scared to death of accidentally touching someone else's urine on a door handle, and for that it is to be commended.

Microsoft is a small city.

It has its own parks, its own fountains, its own this, and its own that. It even has its own West Side Story style gangs which come complete with West Side Story style choreographed gang fights.

It's huge.

In many ways, it feels just like a decently sized college campus. It's obviously part of the outside-world, but you get the feeling that you could sunbathe naked on the lawn and experience little or no repercussions (aside from getting fired and then sued for inflicting emotional damage on emotionally fragile passers-by with your pasty programmer body that's so pale it actually seems to be its own source of light).

Holy crap. Everything's cheap as hell.

I bought OneNote for $10 and MS Encarta 2004 for $10.

I also bought Charles Petzold, but I'm not saying what I paid for him.

I'm not sure who I'm allowed to mention, and whose privacy I have to respect, so I'm just going to play it safe and only mention a couple of people in any specific sense. Otherwise, I'll refer to MS employees in generalities.

After hanging out, going to lunch, and walking around a bit with a bunch of MS people, I have to say that I'm pretty impressed. The conversation was good, everybody was freaky-smart, and there was a very comforting air of camaraderie. I was at a company of 55,000 people, but got to watch a very small, very tightly-knit group of them interact.

You might think that I was drinking the Kool-Aid enough before, but after chilling with some dope MS yahoos, I was looking for a vein into which I could intravenously inject the stuff.

When you're hundreds of miles away from MS, it's easy to think of it as this one big software factory whose only feature is a long conveyor belt out of which copies of Windows and Office constantly stream.

Getting to see the individuals behind all the mumbo-jumbo broke that spell for me. MS started to look more like a giant organism, with all these little cells running around, each doing its job, and doing its job well.

One common quality I noticed was that each person I met was a self-reliant tech-enthusiast. In other words, someone who really cared about his/her work, and who didn't need a bunch of hand holding to ensure that everything got done.

I wish that all these people who hate MS could meet the people who actually run the show. I think they'd be pretty surprised at the general lack of “evil.“

Just before leaving, Shawn and I ran into Don Box.

Being a little star-struck, Don begged to have his photo taken with me. I consented, provided he absolutely would not give me a great big kiss on the cheek, but I guess Don isn't really a man of his word, 'cause check this out [note: It might be difficult to provide independent verification of my version of these events - believe at your own risk]:

We then headed to Shawn's office where I spent the next 15 minutes trying to help Don in his continued quest to understand the basic concepts behind "making C# go beep," but to no avail. That kid is hopeless.

When I accepted that we weren't getting anywhere, I cleared the whiteboard and told him to write "Would you like fries with that?" 1000 times. He might still be at it for all I know.

Whatever.

This was the incredibleist birthday present possible. Shawn, I thank you so very much for giving me the chance to come up and visit MS.

I have every intention of returning some time in the future, although I'm going to avoid leaving in the afternoon. Trying to get anywhere in Washington around 4:00-5:00 PM is a total exercise in futility. I mean, if Yoda really wanted to teach Luke patience, then he would have dropped him in downtown Seattle at 5:00 PM on a weekday in a mini-van full of screaming children.

But the rest of the trip was even perfecter than I expected it to be. Way cool.