The coffee machine had been reprogrammed to do half-pint espressos. There were cases of Red Bull and instant meals in the kitchen. Someone had left a can of deodorant in the toilet - handy instead of a shower if you happen to be at work all night. There were lots of people at work all night.
It was March last year and there was a week to go to the launch of online.ie - an online service designed to bring all the Internet services Irish people need together in one place. After months of planning and preparation, there was still a lot to do. It was getting done, but the drawn faces and air of grim activity indicated the cost.
But launch it did, on March 14th. Not everything was right, not everything was actually there. There is a bit of magic about any new publication - print or online - however, and we were pretty pleased with ourselves.
Just as online.ie launched, the Nasdaq stock index that serves as a barometer of the technology industry reached an all-time high of 5048. It was the high-water mark of the dot.com boom. Nobody in online.ie expected the overheated valuations of 1999 to last, but the violence of the fall that followed was still a shock.
A month after the peak, the Nasdaq was down 34 per cent. All technology companies, not just dot.coms, were hurt. Intel's stock price fell nine per cent in a day. That of Emulex, a networking company, was halved.
Stock market upheavals did not affect online.ie directly. As a private company, funded by venture capital investors, it did not have a public stock price to worry about. The air of dot.com doom that began in March, however, was not going to make it any easier to raise more funding as it was required. Nor would it help the valuation of the company - or the stock options that are part of the deal for staff.
Against this background, the staff at online.ie began to build on the launch. The first big boost was the acquisition of a thriving San Francisco-based community site, IrishAbroad.com. This brought an immediate jump in traffic and membership figures, plus a set of skilled staff.
There was still a lot to do on online.ie. There were parts missing from the three main pillars of the service: content (news and information aggregated from a range of sources, plus "Hosts" running specialist mini-sites within the service); community (discussion groups, free webspace for members); commerce (online shopping, and paid-for services).
As the work went on, a new and still-growing staff had to learn to pull together and understand each other. People had come from very different backgrounds, including newspapers, software and semi-state companies and the manufacturing sector. Several had come from Ireland On-Line, the Internet service provider that had been set up by the two founders of online.ie, Colm Grealy and Barry Flanagan.
Sometimes it seemed that the groups might as well have been from different planets. There were no fist-fights, but there were some very direct discussions as the manufacturing person got to grips with the idea that journalists and programmers didn't clock in and out, factory style, but expected their productivity to be measured in the finished product.
There was far more fun than fighting, though. Almost everyone had come from a much larger organisation, and there was exhilarating freedom to make decisions and act quickly. In a start-up company there is no room for complicated hierarchies or office politics. The jump from idea to execution can be very short indeed.
For some, the fun and the freedom weren't sufficient. As the year wore on several people left. The first departure (a programmer who had put in lots of all-night sessions to get the shopping system going) was a shock. After that, people leaving became less of a shock, and there were lots of new faces coming in at the same time.
Over the summer, online.ie and IrishAbroad were redesigned, and more features were added for members. Behind the scenes, a lot of programming work went into the infrastructure of the service: eliminating remaining bugs, improving robustness, making the publishing more general-purpose so that its facilities could be offered to partner sites or as a commercial service.
The new designs brought online.ie and IrishAbroad closer together in appearance and allowed easier sharing of content between the services. The re-design was well received, and in the autumn online.ie took the award for Best Media Website at the Web Ireland awards. Colm Grealy and Barry Flanagan got a personal award for Internet people of the year.
The editorial content was refined and breaking news added to the News, Business and Sports channels. A deal with Sporting Life provided one of the best running sports news services available on any Irish site. Marketing drives based on the re-designed services brought in flocks of new members. Feedback from new and existing members showed we were doing a lot of things right. By Christmas nearly 90,000 people had registered as members.
Still, the bloodbath in the wider Internet world continued. Every time it seemed as though things might have bottomed out - in May and again in September - it just started right up again. From plunging stock prices, the story turned to job cuts and then closures. Among them were two competitors in the business of building an international community service for Irish people around the world.
Against this background, online.ie/IrishAbroad.com pulled off a minor miracle in the autumn by raising fresh funding of $2.5 million. Not only that, but the money came from new investors and was put in at a higher valuation than the March funding round. At a time when even market-leaders such as Yahoo were down 60 to 80 per cent on their March prices, it was a great vote of confidence.
Approaching the first birthday, the all-night sessions are a thing of the past. There are still a thousand and one things to do every day, however, to build onto existing services and develop a partnership that will add another major service to the online.ie/IrishAbroad network.
The company is moving from the windswept wilds of CityWest to new offices in Fairview, and nobody is going to miss the M50 and Naas Road tailbacks.
The market meltdown is likely to continue, but as one colleague said early on: "This service, or one like it, is going to be very profitable in a few years' time. The natural first-stop for Irish people who want to buy, learn, shop, book tickets, send flowers, read news or just hang out online will be like the phone company was - a natural part of everybody's life."
That knowledge, and the fact that we have it in our hands to make this happen, injects a huge drive into every day. And it's still a lot of fun.
Fiachra O Marcaigh (fiachra@online.ie) is operations editor at online.ie