Microserfs (5 page)

"Sure, Michael."

"Thanks." He booted up his computer. "I guess I'd better prepare for the trip. Where did I store that file - you'd think Lucy Ricardo handled my information for me. Well, Daniel - we'll talk later on?" He looked for something underneath a cardboard box containing a '60s Milton-Bradley game of Memory.

He then looked up at me, gave me an 'I want to return to the controllable and nonthreatening world inside my computer' stare. You have to respect this, so the rest of the crew and I left him inside his office, clicking away on his board, knowing that Michael, like a young beauty swept out of a small Nebraska town by some Hollywood Daddy-O, was soon to leave our midst for headier airs, never to return.

Mom called. Dad stuff - after not sleeping all night again, he dressed for work and then went into the garage once more to work on his model trains. When she tries to talk about the firing, he gets all jolly and brushes it away, saying the future's just going to be fine. But he has no details. No pictures of what comes next.

Dad called. From his den. He wanted to know what the employment situation was like at Microsoft for someone like him. I couldn't believe it. So now I'm worried about him. He should know better. I guess it's shock.

I told him to relax, to not even try to think about doing anything for at least a few more days until the shock wears off. He acted all hurt, as if I was trying to get rid of him. He wasn't himself. I tried to tell him what Karla had told me, about fiftysomethings now just entering the ease-of-use curve with new technologies, but he wouldn't listen. It ended on a bad note, and this bugged me, but I didn't know one other practical thing I could say.

I went to Uwajima-Ya and bought some UFO yaki soba noodles, the ones that steep in hot water in their own little plastic bowl. Amid all the lunch-with-Bill foofaraw, Karla and me managed to eat together. I asked her what her seven Jeopardy! dream categories would be - I told her about everyone else's, and she considered these as she twisted the yaki soba noodles in the little plastic dish, and then she said "they would have to be:"

• Orchards

• Labrador dogs

• The history of phone pranks

• Crime novels

• Intel chips

• Things HAL says in 2001, and

• My parents are psychopaths.

She then said to me, "Dan, I have a question about identity for you. Here it is: What is the one thing more than any other thing that makes one person different from any other person?"

I got all ready to blurt out an answer but then nothing came out of my mouth.

The question seemed so obvious to start with, but when I thought about it, I realized how difficult it is - and sort of depressing, because there's really not very much that distinguishes anyone from anyone else. I mean, what makes one mallard duck different from any other mallard duck? What makes one grizzly bear different from any other grizzly bear? Identity is so tenuous - based on so little, when you really consider it.

"Their personality?" I lamely replied. "Their, uhhh, soul?"

"Maybe. I think I'm beginning to believe the soul theory, myself. Last June I went to my ten-year high school reunion. Everyone's body had certainly aged over the decade, but everyone's essence was essentially the same as it had been when we were all in kindergarten. Their spirits were the same, I guess. Dana McCulley was still a phony; Norman Tillich was still a jock; Eileen Kelso was still shockingly naive. Their bodies may have looked different, but they were absolutely the same person underneath. I decided that night that people really do have spirits. It's a silly thing to believe. I mean, silly for a logical person like me."

As reality returned in mid-afternoon, my "boss," Shaw, came in for a hand-holding session. Shaw is a set-for-lifer. If you had to kill off all of the program managers, one by one, he would be the last to go - he has fourteen direct reports (serfs) underneath him.

Shaw really wanted me to have a juicy problem so he could help me deal with it, but the only problem I could think of was how we're never going to make our shipping deadline in seven days, and with Michael gone, that's just more work for all of us. But this problem wasn't juicy enough for him, so he went off in search of a more exotically troubled worker.

Shaw is fortysomething, one of maybe twelve fortysomethings on the Campus. One grudgingly has to respect someone who's fortysomething and still in computers - there's a core techiness there that must be respected. Shaw still remembers the Flintstones era of computers, with punch cards and little birds inside the machines that squawked, "It's a living."

My only problem with Shaw is that he became a manager and stopped coding. Being a manager is all hand-holding and paperwork - not creative at all. Respect is based on how much of a techie you are and how much coding you do. Managers either code or don't code, and it seems there are a lot more noncoding managers these days. Shades of IBM.

Shaw actually gave me an okay review in the semiannual performance review last month, so I have no personal beef against him. And to be honest, this is still not a hierarchical office: The person with the most information pertinent to any decision is the one who makes that decision. But I'm still cannon fodder when the crunch comes.

Shaw is also a Baby Boomer, and he and his ilk are responsible for (let me rant a second) this thing called "The Unitape" - an endless loop of elevator jazz Microsoft plays at absolutely every company function. It's so irritating and it screams a certain, "We're not like our parents, we're flouting convention" blandness. One of these days it's going to turn the entire under-30 component of the company into a mob of deranged postal workers who rampage through the Administration Building with scissors and Bic lighters.

Checked the WinQuote: The stock was down 85 cents over the day. That means Bill lost $70 million today, whereas I only lost fuck all. But guess who'll sleep better?

We slaved until 1:00 a.m. and I gave Karla and Todd rides home, first making a quick run to Safeway for treats. At the cash register, while paying for our Sour Strings and nectarines, we got into the usual nerd discussion over the future of computing.

Karla said, "You can not de-invent the wheel, or radios, or, for that matter, computers. Long after we're dead, computers will continue to be developed and sooner or later - it is not a matter of if, but when - an 'Entity' is going to be created that has its own intelligence. Will this occur ten years from now? A thousand years from now? Whenever. The Entity cannot be stopped. It will happen. It cannot be de-invented.

"The critical question is, Will this Entity be something other than human? The artificial intelligence community admits it has failed to produce intelligence by trying to duplicate human logic processes. AI-ers are hoping to create life-mimicking programs that breed with each other, simulating millions of years of evolution by cross-breeding these programs together, ultimately creating intelligence - an Entity. But probably not a human entity modeled on human intelligence."

I said, "Well, Karla, we're only human - we can only know our own minds - how can we possibly know any other type of mind? What else could the Entity be? It will have sprung from our own brains - the initial algorithms, at least. There's nothing else we could be duplicating except the human mind."

Todd said that the Entity is what freaks out his ultra-religious parents. He said they're most frightened of the day when people allow machines to have initiative - the day we allow machines to set their own agendas.

"Oh God, I'm trapped in a 1950s B-movie," said Karla.

Afterward, once I was back in my room by myself, I got to mulling over our discussion. Perhaps the Entity is what people without any visions of an afterworld secretly yearn to build - an intelligence that will supply them with specific details - supply pictures.

Maybe we like to believe that Bill knows what the Entity will be. It makes us feel as though there's a moral force holding the reins of technological progress. Maybe he does know. But then maybe Bill simply provides a focus for the company when no other focus can be found. I mean, if it weren't for the cult of Bill, this place would be deadsville - like a great big office supply company. Which is sort of what it is. I mean, if you really think about it.

Woke up at 8:30 and had breakfast in the cafeteria - no crunchy cereals for the next week, thank you.

Over oatmeal, Bug and me were looking at some of the foreign employees - from France, or something - who were smoking outside in the cold and rain. Only the foreign employees smoke here - and always in sad little groups. Smoking's not allowed inside anywhere. You'd think they'd get the message.

We decided that the French could never write user-friendly software because they're so rude - they'd invent a little icon for a headwaiter that, once clicked, made you wait 45 minutes for your file. It's no surprise that user-friendliness is a concept developed on the West Coast. The guy who invented the Smiley face is running for mayor of Seattle - for real. It was in the news.

Mom phoned the minute I entered my office. She visited the garage this morning - a hot, dry Palo Alto morning with white sunlight screaming in through the cracks around the garage door - and there was Dad again in his blue IBM business suit and tie, standing in the center of his U-shaped, waist-high trainscape with just one dim light shining from the ceiling above, pushing his buttons and making the trains shunt and run and speed through mountains and over bridges.

Mom decided that enough was enough, that Dad really needed somebody to talk with - someone to listen to him. She pulled up one of the old Suzy Wong bamboo cocktail bar stools left over from the basement renovation, put aside her usual lack of enthusiasm for his model trains, and talked to Dad about them, like it was show-and-tell time.

"The model train setup has expanded since you were here last, Danny," she told me. "There's a complete small town now, and the mountains are steeper and he's put more of those little green foam trees on them. It's like Perfectville, the town where everybody's supposed to grow up. There's a

church now - and a supermarket and boxcars - he even has little drifters living inside the boxcars. And there's -"

There was a pause.

"And what, Mom?"

Still more silence.

"And - oh, Danny -" This was not easy for her to say.

I said, "And what, Mom?"

"Danny, there is a small white house on the top of the hill overlooking the town - apart from the rest of the landscape. So amongst my other questions I asked him, 'Oh, and what's that house there?' and he said to me, without breaking his pace, 'That's where Jed lives.' "

We were both quiet. Mom sighed.

"How about I come down to Palo Alto tomorrow?" I said. "There's nothing pressing here. Lord knows I have enough time owing to me."

More silence. "Could you, honey?"

I said, "Yes."

"I think that would be good."

I could hear their fridge humming down in California.

"There's so many consultants on the market right now," Mom said. "People always say that if you get downsized you can become a consultant, but your father is 53, Dan. He's not young and he's never been competitive by nature. I mean, he was at IBM. We really just don't know what is going to happen."

I called a travel agent in Bellevue and VISA'd a ticket to San Jose. I skipped e-mail and tried to focus on the overnight stress tests, but my mind was blanking. Two code breaks overnight - so close to shipping and we're still getting breaks!

I tried roaming the corridors for diversion, but somehow the world was different. Michael was in Cupertino (with my luggage); Abe wasn't in his office - he'd bailed out for the day and gone sailing in Puget Sound with some Richie Rich friends; Bug had gone into a crazy mood since breakfast and had a "Get Lost" Post-it note on his door; and Susan was at home for the day preparing for the Vest Fest. And the one other person I wanted to see, Karla, wasn't in her office.

I was leaning over the rails of the central atrium, looking at the art displays in the cases and the spent nerds flopped out on the couches below, when Shaw walked by. I had to be all hearty and rah-rah and perky about the shipping deadline.

Shaw said that Karla was away with Kent doing a marketing something-or-other, and the thought flashed through my head that I wanted to kill Kent, which was irrational and not like me.

The day then degenerated into a "Thousand Dollar Day." That's what I call the kind of day where, even if you tell all the people you know, "I'll give you a crisp, new thousand-dollar bill if you just give me a phone call and put me out of my misery," even still, nobody phones.

I only received eighteen pieces of e-mail, and most of them were bulk. And the WinQuote only went up and down by pennies. Nobody got rich; nobody got poor.

The rain broke around 3:00 and I walked around the Campus feeling miserable. I looked at all the cars parked in the lot and got exhausted just thinking about all the energy that must have gone into these people choosing just the right car. And I also noticed something Twilight-Zoney about all the cars on Campus: None of them have bumper stickers, as though everyone is censoring themselves. I guess this indicates a fear of something.

All these little fears: fear of not producing enough; fear of not finding a little white-with-red-printing stock option envelope in the pigeonhole; fear of losing the sensation of actually making something anymore; fear about the slow erosion of perks within the company; fear that the growth years will never return again; fear that the bottom line is the only thing that really drives the process; fear of disposability . . . God, listen to me. What a downer. But sometimes I think it would be so much easier to be jerking espressos in Lynwood, leaving the Tupperware-sealed, Biosphere 2-like atmosphere of Microsoft behind me.