Chinese Version
11-19-2021， Friday， Sunny

Maggie,a current eBay employee works at the San Jose headquarters, shared a road sign of eBay’s San Jose headquarters on Hamilton with us in our eBay and PayPal’s colleagues group a few days ago. I didn’t expect this picture would attracted such an exclamation from some colleagues. My memories of my previous workplaces are often vivid with big or small stories. Looking at the Motors and Music office buildings opposite of each other in the photo, I remembered a story that began with the name Petra.

Around 2002, there was a beautiful woman named Petra in both of eBay’s product department and development department. One Petra was black-haired petite beauty and the other Petra was brown-haired tall slim beauty. They were both British. Dark-haired Petra was the product manager of eBay’s category in SYI (Sell Your Item) system and she had a strong British accent. Brown-haired Petra was the technical manager of the international development group and she seemed to have no British accent（I just learnt from my eBay colleague Yana that brown-haired Petra is a Austrian).

I remember when my good friend Yang changed the eBay category user interface pages of SYI flow, her product manager was the dark-haired Petra. This project had completed before SYI was converted to Java language.

I am more familiar with the brown-haired Petra. I still remember the first time I met her after I delivered the cross merchanting function on eBay’s US site.

The new software products of eBay were always pushed to the US site first, and then to the international sites in two weeks, because it took extra time to translate the English on the user interface pages into other languages. The user interface pages of individual countries sometimes needed special treatment. For example, German is often much longer than English. The well design pages in English become ugly in German. Because of this, the webpages of eBay German site sometimes needed to be altered a bit.

The software developers in charge of eBay’s US site, which is the core business logics of eBay, were in the Motors building of Hamilton headquarters in San Jose, and the software developers in charge of eBay’s international sites were in the Music (or Sports) building across the street from Motors building.

After the cross merchanting function was successfully promoted to the US site, I heard that the company would soon promote this function to several other major international sites of eBay, including German and UK. One day, a brown-haired tall beautiful woman came to my desk and introduced herself as Petra, who was in charge of the international development team (it seemed that she was not a manager at that time). Her team had spent more than two weeks developing and testing the cross merchanting function, but found that the new function still could not be fully realized on eBay’s UK site, so she came and asked me for help.

Because the default core process of eBay software system was based on US site and each country’s site had some unique if-else logics to branch out to deal with the country’s special business logic, I understood the possibility that the cross merchanting function might not have been fully realized on the UK site. After I asked Petra about the details of the test, I told her: “The main business logic of the cross merchanting logic I implemented was to communicate with the subsequent system through the database. If the cross merchanting function has failed sometimes, it seems related to the writing to or the reading from the database, because the user entered data are directly transmitted to the system.” Later, the cross merchanting function was successfully pushed to Germany, UK etc. sites. I started to know Petra now.

At that time, I received a lot of emails daily in the office as I was belong to many distribution email lists. Because I was always very busy on coding all day and I also needed to stay on top of issues related to my projects might be brought up by emails, if the email senders were unknown to me or the titles of email were not related to my familiar projects, I usually deleted them immediately without opening. One afternoon, I saw brown-haired Petra had sent out an email with the title “eBay is like a shrine”. Because I had attended the Catholic University of American and I knew the church in our school is a national shrine, I wondered how eBay could become a shrine, so I immediately opened the email Petra just sent out. When I saw the content, I could not stop myself from laughing out loudly. Petra’s email showed a screenshot: a flattened twisted small stainless spoon found near the eBay office building was auctioned on eBay US site for more than $4. When eBay was at its very prosperous stage, my life was something liked a fantasy at times.

Little Episodes

1. 2021-11, a photo of a road sign at eBay’s San Jose headquarters, Motors and Music office buildings opposite of each other in the photo. ( taken by Maggie)

2. National Shrine and CUA
“The Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception is a large Catholic minor basilica and national shrine located in Washington, D.C., United States, on 400 Michigan Ave NE, Washington, DC 20017, adjacent to the Catholic University of America. Wikipedia”