Microserfs (29 page)

Bug looked perplexed and happy, but sort of sad, too. He said, "I used to care about how other people thought I led my life. But lately I've realized that most people are too preoccupied with their own lives to give anybody else even the scantiest of thoughts." He looked up at me: "Oh, not you and Karla and the rest of the crew. But people in general. My family's from Idaho. Coeur d'Alene. A beautiful place as ever there was, but believe me, Dan, it's hard to be different there."

As usually happens in our office, he began to fidget with Lego bricks. "It starts out young - you try not to be different just to survive - you try to be just like everyone else - anonymity becomes reflexive - and then one day you wake up and you've become all those other people - the others - the something you aren't. And you wonder if you can ever be what it is you really are. Or you wonder if it's too late to find out."

I had no idea what to say. So I listened, which is often the best idea. And I realized Bug had driven all the way down from San Francisco just to find a person to tell this to.

"Anyway, I never talk about myself, and you guys never ask, and I've always respected that. But there comes a time when you either speak or forfeit what comes next."

He got up. "I'm driving back up the Peninsula. Home. I just wanted to

talk to somebody."

I said, "Good luck, Bug," and he winked at me.

Sassy!

Day of coding. It felt really Microsofty for some reason.

Midday, Karla went walking with Mom and Misty, and the two of them returned absolutely comatose with boredom. I have never seen two people with less chemistry. I just don't understand how I can love two people so much, yet have them be so indifferent to each other.

Oh, and Misty’s getting really F-A-T, even though Mom has her on a "slimming diet." The neighbors are feeding her scraps because she's irresistible. So Mom had to have a dog tag made up that says, "PLEASE DON'T FEED ME, I'M ON A DIET." Karla said Mom should have millions of the things engraved and she could make a fortune selling them all over America, to people.

But, oh, does Misty waddle now!

Smoggy day down in the Valley. Rusty orange. Depressing. Like the 1970s.

Susan told us about her first date with Emmett last night, at a Toys-R-Us superstore in San Francisco. Emmett bought himself a Star Trek Romulan Warbird. Susan bought some infamous "softer, less crumbly Play-Doh" as well as an obligatory Fun Factory, a Bug Dozer as well as a container of "Gak" - a water-based elastic goo-type play object endorsed by Nickelodeon and called by all of us, "the fourth state of matter."

Afterward they parked on the Page Mill Road and monitored cellular phone calls.

Susan’s still obsessing that Fry's doesn't sell tampons. I think Fry's had better look out.

Todd's given up on trying to be political because Dusty no longer cares about the subject and, it would appear, nor does anybody at the office. It was a fun ride while it lasted. He talks to his parents up in Port Angeles more now, too. You can imagine how his religious parents wigged out when he told them he was a Communist. They still believe in Communists.

Ethan and I went out for drinks to the BBC bar in Menlo Park after a "Trip to Europe" (ten hours of coding; so much for yesterday's leisure dictum). We both commented on a sense of unrest in the Valley. The glacial pace of the Superhighway's development is absolutely maddening to the Valley's citizens, their mouths fixed in expressions of relaxed pique amid the LensCrafters franchises, the garages, the S&L buildings, and the science parks. Nonetheless, Broderbund, Electronic Arts, and everybody else here grows and grows, so it's all still happening. Just more slowly than we'd expected.

I said, "Remember, Ethan, these are geeky, on-demand type people who suddenly have to spend their lives as if they're waiting for an Aeroflot flight out of Vladivostok - a flight that may or may never take off." Then I remembered that we're all "Russia'd out" after the political turmoil of the past few weeks and wish I'd not said that.

Ethan was glum: "CD ROM design is beginning to feel like aloe product sales chains and pyramid schemes."

"Ethan - you're our money guy. Don't talk like that!"

"No one wants to pay for the highway's infrastructure - it's too expensive. In the old days, the government simply would have footed the bill, but they don't do much pure research any more. Unless there's a war, but then it's hard to see how Bullwinkle and Rocky interactive CD products will help us crash an enemy. Fuck. We don't even have enemies anymore."

The music was playing a comforting old Ramones song, "I Wanna Be Sedated," and we were feeling maudlin.

"Companies want to be signposts, toll booths, rest stops - anything except actual asphalt. Everyone's afraid of spending heaps of money and becoming the Betamax version of the I-way. And I don't think a war is something that would speed up development. I don't think it's that kind of technology. This thing won't be real until every house in the world has had a little ditch dug up in its front lawn, and an optical fiber installed. Until then, it's all Fantasy Island."

I guess he was remembering how long it took for him to build his own Lego freeway in the office's Lego garden.

We reordered Harvey Wallbangers (1970s night).

"It's just so strange to see this sense . . . of stalematedness," Ethan continued, remembering the Atari boom era. "This was the land where all you ever asked for was all you were ever going to get - so everyone asked Big." He was getting philosophical. "This is the land where architecture becomes irrelevant even before the foundations are poured - a land of sustainable dreams that pose as unsustainable; frighteningly intelligent/depressingly rich." He twisted a cocktail napkin into a rope. "Well," he said, "the magic comes and goes." He chugged a Wallbanger. "But in the end it always returns."

Later on Ethan then became excited and pulled a crumpled sheet of thermal fax paper from his pocket. It was his list of "Interactive Hiring Guidelines" he had laser-printed and faxed throughout the Valley, like one of those "Thank God It's Friday" posters, and was returned to him, about 17th generation. He felt proud to have entered the realm of apocrypha and urban legendary.

The Eight Laws of Multimedia Hiring:

1) Always ask a person, "What have you shipped in the last two years?" That's all you should really ask. If they haven't shipped anything in the last two years, ask, "So what's your excuse?"

2) The "job-as-life phase" lasts for maybe ten years. Nab 'em when they're young, and make sure they never grow old.

3) You can't trust a dog that's bitten you. You wouldn't want to employ someone who you could steal away from another company in the middle of a project.

4) The industry is made up of either gifted techies or smart generalists - the people who were bored with high school - the sort of people the teacher was always telling, "Now, Abe, you could get As if you really wanted to. Why don't you just apply yourself?" Look for these people - the talented generalists. They're good as project and product managers. They're the same people who would have gone into advertising in 1973.

5) One psycho for every nine stable people in the company is a good ratio. Too many maniacally-driven people can backfire on you. Balanced people are better for the long-term stability of the company.

6) Start-up companies beware: kids fresh out of school invariably bail out after a few years and join the big tech monocultures in search of stability.

7) People are most ripe for pilfering from tech monocultures in their mid- to late 20s.

8) The upper age limit of people with instincts for this business is about 40. People who were over 30 at the beginning of the late 1970s PC revolution missed the boat; anyone older is like a Delco AM car radio.

I suggested he plug the text into the Net in comp.hiring. slavery, and see what other laws get tacked on, but he got offended and said that because he had the paper version that these were "THE LAWS," and I realized there was no fighting either it or him.

"Ethan," I said, "thermal paper, I mean, how 1991."

Another super-long day. It's 6:00 a.m. I think I see the sky pinking up. Oh God - dawn.

Susan is tormenting poor Emmett now by ignoring him. Poor Emmett is feeling "pumped and dumped."

Susan's switched off her instant mail, and whenever moonstruck Mr. Couch visits her workstation she rations out her words, saying that she's too busy coding and/or too busy working on her Chyx 'zine, called "Duh . . . ," to speak with him.

Susan set up a Chyx Internet address and forecasts at least a hundred Chyx signed up on the Net by next week. She wants to set up forums about Fry's not selling tampons being a metaphor for men's fear of women, new product ideas, Barbie cults, and so forth. She's obsessively into it.

"I could structure the forums and bulletin boards like an issue of Sassy . . . there'd be comments, and a place to ask other women for advice . . . what's that column called?"

"Zits and stuff," Karla promptly replies.

"Oh yeah. Well, I wouldn't call it that, but something like personal narratives: 'IT HAPPENED TO ME'."

"I was the best programmer in my division and that jerk Tony got a promotion!"

"It happened to me: I dated a marketing manager and he turned out to be an asshole!"

"It happened to me: I was the only girl in Silicon Valley and still couldn't get a date!" (Susan).

"It happened to me - I wrote a Melrose Place scriptwriting program that generated vibrant, nonlinear, marginally controversial plot lines and made a fortune!"

Susan's on a crusade. Or a rampage.

Karla printed out the following letters and posted them all on her cubicle. They're HAL 9000's letters from 2001:

ATM

HIS

MEM

LIF

FLX

CNT

COM

NUC

VEH

Ethan flamed some of Bug's code this afternoon. "Jesus, Bug - what are you making here - hot dogs? You've put in everything including the snout . . . everything but the squeal."

Bug told him to piss off, and who does he think he is . . . Bill? The old Bug would have held a local McDonald's hostage with a sawed-off carbine. Good for Bug.

We were discussing computer-aided animation and we realized that it would have taken every computer in the world then in existence to morph Elizabeth Montgomery's nose into a twinkle-twinkle on Bewitched -

"ENIACS and all that," said Karla. "You could do it on a Mac now. In two minutes."

Jeremy came over this afternoon, and he's Bug's double. Twinsville.

He showed up at the front door of the office and all seven of us stampeded foyer-ward like 101 Dalmatians to gawk out the front window as he and Bug walked away to Jeremy's Honda.

Karla said the relationship had to be somewhat serious because "you know how hard it is to lure anybody down here from San Francisco." She's right. You could offer San Franciscans a free Infiniti J30 and they'd still have some excuse not to drive 25 measly miles down to Silicon Valley.

Actually, there's a slight back-and-forth snobbery between the Valley and the City. The Valley thinks the City is snobby and decadent, and the City thinks the Valley is techishly boring and uncreative. But I can see these impressions starting to blur. This all sounds like that old Joan Baez song, "One Tin Soldier."

While taking Misty on a walk with Mom through the Stanford Arboretum, Mom was telling me about this conversation she heard between two people with Alzheimer's down at the seniors home where she volunteers:

"A: How you doin'?

B: Pretty good. You?

A: How you doin' ?

B: I'm okay.

A: So you're doing okay?

B: How you doin'?"

I laughed, and she asked me why, and I said, "It reminds me of America Online chat rooms!" She demanded an example, so I gave her one:

A: Hey there.

B: Hi,A.

A: Hi, B

C: Hi

B: Look, C's here.

A: Hi,C!

B: CCCCCCCCCC

C: A + B = A + B

A: Gotta go

B: Bye,A

C: Bye, A

B: Poo

C: Poo poo

"This," I said, "is the much touted, transglobal, paradigm-shifting, epoch-defining dialogue to which every magazine on earth is devoting acres of print."

Oh - Misty's fur was covered in burrs, and it took us fifteen minutes to remove them.

Mom really has all of this new energy now that she swims every day. And her confidence has swelled enormously since winning the swim meet. She's been restacking her rock pile with extra vigor.

Astounding gossip meltdown: Susan and poor, meek little Emmett Couch, our manga-phobic storyboarder, went nuclear. It was SO embarrassing - right in the middle of the office Emmett started bellowing, "You just think of me as a piece of meat, Susan - I'm not sure I like that."

And Susan said back, "I don't call you a piece of meat. I call you my

fuck toy."

(Susan surveys room for rebuttal, we all sit there, pretending to work, our eyes like sad-eyed velvet painting waifs, staring at our keyboards.)

"Well, I'm not sure I like that," Emmett says.

"Well, what do you want - to take it further? You want a relationship?''

"Well . . ."

"Stop sniveling. I thought the deal was, we just have sex and leave it at that. Don't annoy me. I have to get back to work."

So Emmett went back to work. We, of course, were silent, but the instant-mail was flying on each other's screens. Blink blink blink. We were riveted. Poor Emmett's in love, and Susan doesn't want that. Or maybe she likes this type of relationship. People always get what they need. She's truly earned her stud medal on this one.