London

That year I was interning at Facebook, now Meta. During my internship, our group held an annual off-site in the United Kingdom. My mentor asked almost as soon as I arrived whether I wanted to join. I said I would think about it.

The first priority of an internship is securing a full-time offer. The entire internship lasted only twelve weeks. If I spent one of them in Britain producing nothing—and please do not tell me the off-site counted, because full-time employees attended the meetings while interns could only wander around outside—I had no idea what that might do to my return offer.

There were four interns in our group: three Chinese and one American. My U.S. visa and that of one other Chinese intern were still valid; the third Chinese intern’s had expired. If he left the United States, he would have to apply for another U.S. visa before returning, with no telling how long that might take.

That left three of us who could realistically go. Would we? Everyone kept telling me they were staying behind: too much risk to the offer, too dangerous, and so forth. I never asked what the American intern was thinking, but he decided not to go either.

I had never said that I was definitely going. Then, two weeks before departure, my mentor asked again: Was I coming? Was I really sure I did not want to? I should just go; it would be fine. The entire group would be in Britain for the week anyway. Even if we interns stayed behind, the eight-hour time difference meant that we would receive little guidance and would spend the week working on our own. Faced with such an enthusiastic invitation, I thought: why not?

The larger reason was that, at the time, I regarded job interviews as almost trivial. I was a competitive programmer. The coding interviews that terrified other people felt like quick runs through easy problems to me, and I believed I could interview almost anywhere I wanted. Unless an interviewer introduced some truly unpredictable complication, I did not expect to fail. I therefore did not attach quite the same life-or-death importance to the return offer as the others did. I decided to go.

Then came the British visa. What I remember most clearly is how extraordinarily expensive it was. Without company reimbursement, it was not something one could pursue casually. As I recall, I applied for a five-year visa that cost a little over $800 after conversion. Because I did not begin until two weeks before departure, expedited processing added several hundred more. My recollection is that the total came to roughly $1,300. That was quite a price for a visa.

On the other hand, once the fees were paid and the documents were in order, the process itself went very smoothly. Only a week passed between submitting the application and the consulate mailing my passport back. I should have been able to catch my flight.

Then the real complication arrived. I was a PhD student researching parallel computing, but this was the first time I had experienced just how much trouble an asynchronous consistency problem could cause in my own life.

The tracking page said my passport would arrive that morning, so I stayed home all day. The package could appear in one of two places: at my door or in the apartment complex’s parcel lockers. I did not know which the courier would choose, but because the package contained my passport, I intended to retrieve it immediately.

At about 10:30 a.m., I refreshed the tracking page and watched the status change from “out for delivery” to “delivered,” with the location listed as my front door. I opened the door and found nothing outside. Perhaps, I thought, the courier had marked it delivered downstairs before bringing it up, or something similar. I decided to wait five minutes. Five minutes later, nothing had happened. I concluded that the package was lost.

I reported the missing package online. Its status changed to an exception, and there it remained.

That afternoon I went to the nearby courier office and explained the situation. An employee said he would check when the day’s undelivered packages returned. Six o’clock arrived, and nothing happened. He said he would contact the driver. By after seven, he still had not reached the driver, who had finished work for the day. At that point he began spinning an extraordinary tale. According to him, mine counted as a failed delivery. The package would return to a holding center, board a plane with other parcels, take a grand tour of the United States to the company’s East Coast hub, be sorted again with local shipments, fly all the way back west, and somehow arrive at my home the following morning.

Listen to that story. If every misdelivered package had to follow such a route, the courier company would have gone bankrupt by the next day.

I am not exaggerating. I remember him saying exactly this, complete with expansive gestures, as though it all made perfect sense. There ought to be limits even to improvised nonsense.

The only conclusion I reached was that no conclusion was available there. The man plainly knew nothing and was making up the rest. I could only return the next day. It was nearly eight when I finally made it home from the courier office, physically and mentally exhausted.

Early the next morning, I returned to the office. Nothing had changed. The online status still showed an exception, and no one knew what had happened. The employee could only say that he would try the driver again. He failed to reach the driver that morning, despite the fact that the driver was now working. I went to work. That afternoon I returned, and he tried once more. At long last he reached the driver, who said he had already delivered the package but could no longer change its online status. The tracking page, meanwhile, still displayed an exception.

With the driver’s confirmation in hand, I went home again. The space outside my door was as empty as before. Now what? Could the passport possibly be in the parcel lockers? I had never received the usual text message saying that a package was waiting there.

I went to the lockers, tapped my building card, and one compartment sprang open. My passport really was inside.

I was delighted. I finally had my passport, and it now seemed that I could make the flight. Only four days remained before departure.

Afterward, I reconstructed the incident carefully. My background in computer science—and parallel computing in particular—proved unexpectedly useful in analyzing it.

Based on what the driver had said, my best reconstruction was this. That morning, the driver arrived beside the parcel lockers with a large batch of packages. He had scanned mine while still in the truck, changing its status to delivered. His next task was to put each package into a locker, scan it again, and then scan the locker. Under normal circumstances, the system would update the status to show delivery to a locker, while the locker system would send the recipient a message telling them to collect it.

I happened to intervene between those steps by reporting the package missing, changing its status to undelivered—or, in the system’s terms, an exception. When the driver later tried to scan my package, the scan no longer worked. What else could he do? He put the package into a locker and scanned the locker, presumably trying to trigger the notification. That also failed because the preceding step had already failed: the locker system could no longer associate that compartment with my package. The sequence ended with the physical passport inside the locker, the delivery system showing an exception, and no notification reaching me.

As for the courier employee’s story about my package touring the United States, that was pure invention—groundless and gloriously absurd.

I later told my mentor what had happened. He also thought my reconstruction sounded entirely plausible. What other explanation was there?

With passport and visa safely in hand, I could finally go to Britain.

Before all this, I had booked the flight and hotel through Facebook’s internal travel site, with the company covering both. The system showed me an $8,000 allowance for my flight to Europe, enough for a round-trip business-class ticket. It was my first long-haul international flight in business class.

The hotel was equally extravagant. I simply chose the first option recommended by the internal site. It stood in central London, less than 200 meters from the office. The price was $8,700 for less than a week—more than $1,000 per night on average. The booking site explicitly advised choosing one of its recommendations; exceeding the expected rate with another hotel might complicate reimbursement. If the system was willing to recommend it, I was willing to book it. It became one of the most expensive hotels I have ever stayed in.

On the day of my flight, some fellow interns saw me off over a spicy hot pot meal. I should not have eaten that hot pot.

A business-class seat could lie flat, but that did not mean I arrived in Britain feeling well. By the time I landed, my head felt ready to explode; the migraine was severe. At the hotel, I discovered that my power plugs were, as expected, useless. My plan had been simple: the office was so close that I could collect an adapter there after arriving. I had not anticipated arriving with such a headache. Going without power was not an option, however, so I forced myself to walk to the office and retrieve an adapter from one of its vending machines.

Facebook’s London office was unlike the Bay Area headquarters. It was not a campus but a single building spread across many floors. This was the lobby. A sponsor’s logo must always be enormous.

I collected the adapter and fled. My head hurt too much to remain.

By the following day, the pain had become so severe that I could barely get out of bed. At the time, I did not understand the cause and assumed it was merely the result of an eight-hour time difference. Only later, after taking more international flights and accumulating considerably more experience with jet lag, did I notice a pattern. I became fairly convinced that the hot pot had probably triggered it.

That afternoon, once the pain became tolerable, my determination to sightsee took over. I got out of bed and went in search of landmarks.

Our first stop was 221B Baker Street, Sherlock Holmes’s famous address. The uniformed man standing outside was in great demand; visitor after visitor wanted a photograph with him.

There was a long line at the entrance, though I had chosen a sensible time and it was not excessively long. Inside was a remarkably rich collection of rooms and scenes recreated from the stories, along with wax figures. The British clearly had their own deep affection for Sherlock Holmes.

We then visited Madame Tussauds London. This was the British Madame Tussauds—the place I had last encountered in an English textbook.

Next came Platform 9¾ at King’s Cross Station. It is not on a real platform at all, but beside a wall in the station’s public concourse, set up specifically for photographs.

The line was extremely long and moved painfully slowly. Staff dressed each visitor in a wizard’s robe, handed them a wand, and lifted the robe behind them so that it looked as though they were running, while someone captured the pose. The process took time. Between visitors, I photographed the empty setup and promptly escaped.

That ended the day’s itinerary. Every attraction had been within walking distance. Before my head could explode again, I hurried back to the hotel.

Over the next few days, I quietly completed some work at the office and met the remote mentor based there.

The World Cup was underway, and I watched a match on the enormous screen in the office cafeteria. This was a tradition dating back to the Facebook days: the Bay Area headquarters showed World Cup matches on its cafeteria screens all day as well.

Then the weekend returned. At last, my head no longer hurt.

Once I was up, my first destination was the British Museum.

The collection was certainly extensive. I paid particular attention to this internet-famous little figure apparently being slapped in the face.

We then went to the National Gallery. To be honest, I have little interest in art appreciation and even less ability. Yet several paintings there genuinely impressed me. Perhaps they were simply executed with such precision that they appealed to the scientific part of my brain.

That concluded the day. The museums were large, and I had spent several hours inside them.

The following day, I met a high school classmate who was pursuing a PhD in London, and he took me farther afield.

First came Big Ben.

It is too famous to require much introduction. At the time it was under restoration, wrapped in layer upon layer of scaffolding until it looked like a building being upgraded in a video game. Perhaps to spare tourists’ feelings, they had at least left the clock face visible. Ordinary construction scaffolding rarely seemed quite so carefully arranged.

Then came the Palace of Westminster, another building that appeared to have stepped directly out of my English textbooks.

Westminster Cathedral.

Buckingham Palace.

The London Eye.

Views over the Thames and central London from the London Eye.

Our final stop was Tower Bridge.

The commemorative photograph turned out exceptionally well.

That finally ended the day.

That evening, I said I wanted to try fish and chips. I had been in Britain for several days without eating its most famous national dish. My classmate took me from one restaurant to another, but none of them served it. At the last one, a member of staff gave us a distinctly disdainful look and suggested that we try a little takeaway place. His expression seemed to say, “What respectable restaurant would serve that stuff?”

Eventually, we really did find fish and chips at a small no-frills place—though it was technically a restaurant with a storefront. It was certainly authentic. And absolutely terrible!

To finish, here is the food from the flight home. This was only my second time in business class—the outbound flight had been the first—and in my unworldly excitement, I photographed everything that arrived.

And with that, my London journey came to a satisfying close.