Microsoft campus mystery lives on

A new-hire hazing ritual and other employee pranks at Microsoft's Redmond campus may live on, thanks to some good-humored building planners at the company.

The jokes revolve around the mysterious building seven. The Seattle area has 116 Microsoft buildings and the buildings on the Redmond campus are numbered sequentially except for the number seven. There isn't one.

The missing building is fodder for various commonly executed employee pranks (or at least regularly boasted-about jokes).

Perhaps the best known is when Microsoft managers send new hires to meetings in building number seven, so that they can snicker while the new kid on the block scrambles to find the building. Or another good one entails making an anonymous call to the new hire late in the day and telling them to report to building seven within 20 minutes to pick up a security badge.

Other employees announce to co-workers that they're heading to building seven when they're going outside for a cigarette or lunch break.

But all the fun and games threatened to end recently with a new campus expansion. The facilities team announced that one of the new buildings that is part of a massive campus development would carry the number seven. That news produced a flurry of outcry from employees nostalgic about keeping this piece of campus lore alive.

The facilities managers seem to have a sense of humor because -- at least according to one employee blog that refers to an employee newsletter -- they relented. The blogger said that the facilities department decided against using the number seven in response to the outcry.

Microsoft jokers aren't out of the woods yet, however. The company's public relations firm said that Microsoft in fact hadn't announced or decided on anything yet regarding building seven.

Either way, the mystery is still unsolved. Microsoft workers have some good theories about why there isn't a building number seven. One, who posted a comment on a colleague's blog, said that when construction companies started to clear an area for building seven, they found that the ground wasn't stable enough to support a building. Plans for buildings eight through 10 were already under way, however, so they just skipped the number seven.

Another Microsoft blogger says that the company was expanding very quickly and decided to make buildings eight, nine, and 10 twice the size of previous buildings and that decision involved using up the space that had been allocated for building seven.

A commenter on that blog said that actually the city wouldn't let the company build number seven on the chosen site because at the time it was too far away from the main campus entrance and emergency vehicles wouldn't be able to reach it quickly enough. Because Microsoft wouldn't pay to widen another nearby road that would have enabled quicker emergency access, the blogger wrote, the city refused to permit the building.

Microsoft's PR firm gave me an official explanation that is really an amalgamation of some of these theories. Apologies to anyone so interested that this amounts to torture, but I've decided not to spell it out further in the spirit of letting the (harmless) stories flourish.