MOUNTAIN VIEW — You could call Chloe Bridgewater’s application to work at Google a moonshot.
And, like the most of the projects in Google’s legendary experimental “moonshot” unit known as “X,” it could take years to net a payoff, if at all.
Chloe’s barely out of kindergarten.
Still, it’s not every Google job applicant who does an end run around the HR department, goes straight to the top, and reportedly gets a letter back from her target, CEO Sundar Pichai.
“My name is Chloe and when I am bigger I would like a job at Google,” wrote Chloe, from the U.K. “I am 7 years old and my teachers tell my mum and dad I am very good in class and am good at my spelling and my reading and my sums.
“I like computers too and have a tablet I play games on. My dad gave me a game where I have to move a robot up and down squares, he said it will be good for me to learn about computers.”
The Mountain View tech giant’s famed employee perks added to the company’s attraction for young Chloe.
“My dad said I can sit on bean bags and go down slides and ride go-karts in a job in Google,” she wrote, according to the BBC.
(It turns out that Papa Bridgewater’s claim of go-karting at Google is an alternative fact, but the company confirmed that go-karting, at least so far as characters from Nintendo’s “Mario Kart” video game are concerned, is not entirely absent from the firm’s campuses:
“We don’t have go-karts on campus, but Googlers have been known to dress up like Mario, Toad and Princess Peach from time to time,” a Google spokesperson said.
Now, it would be incorrect to assume that Chloe is the sort who habitually sends missives to the prominent and powerful. But when she does put pen to paper, she aims high.
“I have only ever sent one other,” she wrote of her letter, “and that was to Father Christmas.”
In what would be a tactical mistake from an adult job applicant, but is rather charming coming from an ambitious kid, Chloe expressed interest in non-Google careers.
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“I also want to work in a chocolate factory and do swimming in the Olympics,” she wrote.
And Pichai, unlike Father Christmas, wrote back.
“Thank you so much for your letter,” Pichai wrote, according to the BBC. “I’m glad that you like computers and robots, and hope that you will continue to learn about technology.
“I think if you keep working hard and following your dreams, you can accomplish everything you set your mind to — from working at Google to swimming at the Olympics.
“I look forward to receiving your job application when you are finished with school! :)”
