For a long time now, I’ve been a huge fan of Reddit – the best darned news aggregator out there. My Reddits include cognitive science, science, psyschology, technology, world news, math, and comics.

Anyway, a while back, Alexis from Reddit contacted my fiance, Zach, to tell him that he enjoys Zach’s comic. This was super exciting news, and when Zach and the Reddit guys scheduled a lunch date for today, I invited myself along.

In my mind I had imagined the guys running Reddit to serious, suit-wearing business types. To my surprise, they’re actually laid-back 20-somethings (maybe early 30’s??) who volunteer their spare time to teach the local goldfish how to play soccer.

For lunch we went to a cute Caribbean restaurant near their office in San Francisco. The guys were really easy to talk to and even seemed interested in my tales of grad school hardships and rattlesnake-tracking ordeals up in Michigan. As I love any opportunity to tell a story, and they were kind enough to listen, this immediately put them at the top of my list.

Back at their office, we learned the following fascinating bits of information about the Reddit guys:

1) They arrange their desktop icons by penis. That’s right, the icons on their desktop form a giant wang. This is apparently awesome 99.9% of the time, but 0.01% of the time (when 7th graders visit the office to see what running a website is all about) it becomes a bit awkward.

2) They can feed Mrs. Splashy Pants (their pet goldfish) without being anywhere near his/her tank. The guys have rigged it up so that remotely opening a CD drive on the computer nearest the fishtank starts up a Rube Goldberg machine, which results in the delivery of fish pellets to the tank.

3) They have the power at their fingertips to deliver “Internet Justice.” They offered to deliver to me the head of my enemy, but I politely declined… for now.

All in all, it was a great few hours. Most importantly, they sent us home with free stuff (a graduate student’s favorite thing)! We received Reddit bobbleheads, t-shirts, and I got a giant squishy sheep. It was laying around the office and I’m guessing they’ve grown tired of jokes about dirty things to do it, so they were ready to release it to a new home. I’ll take good care of it guys, I promise.