Half-baked thoughts regarding the company water cooler

Half-baked thoughts regarding the company water cooler

Back in June 2013 when I was writing here every day, I had another one of my half-baked ideas. This one just sat on the pile of post ideas -- I never used it back then.

It's a pretty goofy one. It's a canonical half-baked idea. It's so goofy, that I imagine even you reading this right now will react badly when you get to the actual idea.

First the name: "Silicon Valley Snackwatch", or maybe just "Snackwatch". Tech is bigger than the Valley, after all.

This is where people would report in and say what's up with the food and drink situation wherever they work. Then people could plot it over time and look for shifts in company behavior.

I'm talking about the cafe situation, the micro kitchen situation, whether there are vending machines or not, whether they charge you money or not, if they are subsidized or not, and so on.

Have your favorite cookies disappeared? Is everything full of flax now? Are the coolers full of air instead of drinks even at 8 AM on a Monday? You get the idea. Send in pictures or just reports of the carnage.

See, I told you that you'd react badly to this.

Would anyone leave a job over this? Nah. But just talking about the way things shift can make the PR people really nervous, and the truth's a bitch sometimes, isn't it?

Incidentally, as for the name? It's a play on a product name from a past life. "Rackwatch" was a simple little thing that did basic health checks on customer machines. You can see how it's just a hop skip and a jump from that to "Snackwatch" when some of my more snarky neurons start firing.

Bonus points for anyone using computer vision stuff to do it automatically.