When you walk through the next door, though, the one which requires keycard access, life gets a lot better.

There’s a huge portion of the downstairs area devoted to a large screen and mounted projector. Encircling that is a crescent-shaped set of some very comfortable brown couches, with yet more comfortable couches behind them — one of which actually turns into a bed — and a giant table behind that. You know, for work. There’s a kitchen filled with free snacks and drinks, electric scooters to quickly travel between buildings, a pool table that’s been converted to a ping-pong table, and Nintendo Wii controllers scattered everywhere. There are Mozilla posters, and Firefox stickers, and awards we’ve won, and news articles about us decorating the walls. There are offices down there, too, but they seem almost like afterthoughts. The downstairs area is everything you imagine a dotcom workspace to be. A playground.

Upstairs, things get a little more serious. There are cubes, sure, but most of them are conjoined, and with the walls being so minimal and the ceiling being so high you never even feel like you’re in an office. Natural light permeates throughout the space — from the sun roof in the center, to the large windows all around the second story — and you could work most of a summer day without ever flipping a light switch on. Some people even got patio umbrellas for their desks for shade, they get so much sunlight. There are little, odd-shaped tables scattered about called collaboration stations, where people can sit together and bounce ideas off of each other, and office chairs which we have in about as many colors as we do configurations. There’s a kitchen up there, too, and if you look in the freezer you’ll probably find a couple different kinds of ice cream.

Across the complex is our other building, filled mostly with engineers. They have a kitchen, and scooters, and couches too, but it’s more quiet there. Disciplined even. I visit there every so often and the vibe is just so completely different. There are a lot of distractions in the main building, but in this one things are focused. They are serious cat, and that are serious thread. Still, I do enjoy my time there if only because I think the Building K (that’s the main building) people kind of take my being there for granted at this point, and the Building S people manage almost entirely without me, which is both refreshing and unsettling.

It makes me curious, though, about how the dynamic of the company might be if ever we were all under one roof. I should hope whatever brave new space we might someday end up in is as open, collaborative, and unique as the current one is. Because, really, at this point I couldn’t imagine anything less working for Mozilla.

The short of it is that I do desktop support here at Mozilla. All of it. Desktop support is an odd position because while the work invariably ends up being less technical than that of the other members in my department, I — and this isn’t immediately obvious — actually have a higher level of access than probably anyone else in the company. This includes my boss, his boss, all the way on up the chain. This is so, in part, because I actually have no-questions-asked physical access to everyone else’s computers, let alone the datacenter and all the requisite administration privileges of someone working in IT. That, along with the simple fact that my job requires I interface with literally everyone in the company, means I have a sort of backstage pass to all of Mozilla.

So, what does that mean? Well, I guess the hope there is that all this freedom makes me uniquely qualified to share a point of view with the world (or the PLANET. Ha!) at large, on Mozilla. One that’s both broadly sampled, and finely nuanced. A point of view that’s just about as close to the ground level as you can get.

The view from the bottom.

My aim here, in case the title isn’t obvious enough, is to write about what life here at Mozilla is like. I won’t be writing about some new technology I used, or fix I made, or service I launched. Nope. I don’t even do that stuff! It’s going to be entirely about my take on what it’s like at Mozilla. Working here, playing here, living here.

It’s going to be a work blog in that it will be work safe, but in every other aspect I have a feeling that it’s going to end up a much more personal account than work blogs generally end up being. We’ll see though. I mean, it could end up being total shit.

Wait, did I say work safe?