Twitter operated out of a Boulder office on Walnut St. for years, mostly housing the employees of Gnip, a company that sold Twitter data to enterprise customers which Twitter had acquired.

The Walnut office consisted of the top two floors, 3 and 4.

Over time the office morphed from being "Gnip" to being a genuine Twitter office, with folks from all kinds of teams working out of the office including Timelines, DMs, Health, and Tweets. Most of the teams were geo-distributed.

It grew fast.

By early 2019 people started cramming extra folks into the desks ("desk buddies"). People who were often in meetings (product mostly) were asked to hotdesk.

To alleviate this, Twitter leased the basement of the building, as floors 1 and 2 were leased to other companies. Construction on the basement location was pretty secretive, with the REW (Real Estate and Workplace) team wanting to unveil the new space in a grand opening when complete.

August 2019 the space opened and... everyone hated it.

Since it was in a basement, there were no windows. The entire area felt like some kind of Twitter-themed tomb with big glass walls or strange hanging "soundproof" panels separating work areas.

Nobody liked being down there because it was separated from the main common areas and all of the other employees. It felt isolated & lonely - coming into the office typically meant you wouldn't see anyone else from other floors except when you took the extremely slow elevator upstairs for lunch.

There was a great deal of drama as teams fought NOT to be reassigned to the "Twitter Dungeon" as it came to be called (REW hated this name and thwarted attempts to have laptop stickers printed).

It became the place to take meetings when the conference rooms on 3 & 4 were booked, or the floor with a guaranteed empty bathroom if the stalls were full.

People would come down to use the facilities, then ascend back to the surface world while we digital Drow asked if they had news from the up above.

The discontent with the basement location was strong and the office was still growing, so another attempt was made.

Twitter tried to lease the east side of the building but the landlord asked for too much money, so Twitter subleased the top floor of the building behind it.

Subleasing meant it wasn't decorated with Twitter design or outfitted like the main office. There were still logos of the company that leased it out.

It always felt like the fake office, which is how people referred to it.

This location didn't connect to the Walnut office, so walking between offices meant taking the one working elevator down to the ground floor, walking outside, going about one block around the corner, entering the Walnut office, and finally taking the elevator up 3 floors.

This office opened in December of 2019 in Colorado so it was cold or snowing often, which meant bundling up to go take a meeting or even get a printout, as the printer never worked and IT never visited.

Though there were windows, the work areas had no carpeting, so your rolling chairs would be constantly trying to smoothly inch you away from your desk towards the middle of the room, you had to clutch your desktop to stop from rolling away.

When we asked for carpeting to be installed, REW threw some random rugs on the floor that weren't cut to fit the room, so they would sort of just lay in the middle of the room or curl upright against corners and walls.