I want to expand more on the comedy of errors that led to the eviction of #Twitter from their Boulder, Colorado office.

The story that leads up to this building even existing is bizarre and hilarious, so here goes...

A thread 🧵

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/06/judge-ruled-twitter-must-be-evicted-from-colorado-office-over-unpaid-rent/

Twitter evicted from office amid lawsuits over unpaid rent and cleaning bills

Twitter evicted in Boulder, Colo., still faces unpaid-rent suit at HQ in California.

Ars Technica

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.

laptop stickers

Always found them awkward. I mean, “…Is it one of those Express Yourself attempt at phone covers?” Always found them distracting.