The Building Got Me

My office building in Tokyo is sort of crazy. First of all, it is impossible to get into the building at off peak hours as a first time visitor. Also, all the doors are push doors when I am expecting pull doors and vice versa. Even the door to my bathroom in my hotel room opens outwards, which is a little weird.

At about 6 pm or so, I learned not to take the stairs the hard way. I went into the stair well to get one of the other floors of the Google office and realized that the doors are all lock behind you and nobody comes into the stair well to let you out. I figured that I would just go to the bottom floor and take the elevator but the bottom floor just led to some emergency shelter or something of that sort and then I had to climb back up to the 6th floor and start knocking on the door to our office. Luckily, it wasn't too long before some nice person let me in again.

The last thing that got me was that you need a visitor card to get into the building on the first day and then you need to give that visitor card up to a machine when you leave the office. My main visitor card would not start working until the second day and I didn't quite realize this until I left for dinner but left my stuff in the office on the first night. Consequently, there was no way for me to get back into the building even with another Googler (because of this machine) to get my stuff. I did manage to sneak in though so all was not lost.