YouTube.com, a popular video sharing website, was purchased last week by Google, for a total of nearly 1.65 billion dollars worth of Google stock, or nearly 14 shares of the company at today's prices.
"We expected to find a bunch of desks and file cabinets inside, but were shocked to learn that each of these six trucks were packed full of crates containing all of the original hard copies of the videos hosted on the site," said Google warehouse manager Steven Browne.
"I saw seven or eight huge crates inside one of these rigs that just had 'Numa Numa' scrawled on the side in black Sharpie. Looks like this is going to be a bit more work than we expected."
A spokesperson from Google admitted that the company was surprised to learn that YouTube had been receiving physical copies of the more than 4.7 million videos hosted on their site, which they had been reviewing and uploading manually to their servers since the site went live last November.
"We thought the users did all that stuff on their own," said the company spokesperson. "I guess we didn't really know what we were getting into here--that sure is a lot of Numa Numa to go through!"
In an interview with The Sacramento Bee published in this Sunday's edition of the paper, founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen admitted that they spent most of their time at YouTube sorting through and digitizing the thousands and thousands of user-submitted videos that arrived in the mailbox each and every day.
"It was pretty overwhelming," said Hurley. "I had to take boxes of those things home every weekend as well--it was driving my wife nuts."
"Frankly, I can't believe Google gave us so much for the company," added Chen. "At this point, I would have paid them 1.65 billion as long as they just guaranteed that I never had to sit through that stupid 'Lazy Sunday' video ever again!"
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