Microserfs Page 3
I juggled some small rocks I found beside me. She said she didn't know I could juggle and I told her it was something I learned by osmosis in my last product group.
We got up and walked together back to Building Seven. I pushed my bike. We walked over the winding white cement path speckled with crow shit, past the fountains, and through the hemlocks and firs.
Things seem different between us now, as if we've somehow agreed to agree. And God, she's skinny! I think I'm going to bring her snacks to eat tomorrow while she works.
I hope this isn't like feeding a raccoon.
Worked until just past midnight and came back home. Had a shower. Three bowls of Corn Flakes and ESPN. My weekends are no different than my weekdays. One of these days I'm going to vanish up to someplace beautiful like Whidbey Island and just veg for two solid days.
* * *
Todd is compressing code this week and as a sideline invented what he calls a "Prince Emulator" - a program th@ converts whatever you write into a title of a song by Minnesotan Funkmeister, Prince. I sampled it using part of today's diary.
* * *
A few minutz l8r I bumpd in2 Karla walkng akros the west lawn. She walkz rEly kwikly & she'z so smal, like a litl kid.
It wuz so odd 4 both uv us, C-ng Ech uthr outside the otmeel walz + oystr karpetng uv the ofiss. We stopd & s@ on the lawn + talkd 4 a wile. We shared a fElng uv konspiraC by not B-ng inside helpng with the shippng dedline.
I askd hr if she wuz lookng 4 shroomz with the Dedhedz, but she sed she wuz going nutz in hr ofiss, & she just had 2 B in the wild 4 a few minutz in the 4St B-side the Kampus. I thot this wuz such an unuzual aspekt uv hr
prsonaliT, I mEn, B-kuz she'z so mowsy + indorzy lookng. It wuz good 2 C hr & 4 once 2 not hav hr yellng @ me 2 stop B-ng a noosanss. We'v wrkcl mayB 10 officz apart 4 half a yEr, + we'v nevr once rEly talkd 2 Ech uthr.
I showd Karla sum brch bark I'd pEld off a trE outside Bildng 9 & she showd me sum skarlet soomak lEvz she had found in the 4St. I told hr about the diskussion MarT, AntonLa, Harold, + I had B-n havng about dogz & katz ovr @ Nin-10-do'z staf piknik tablz. She lA down on the ground + thot about this, so I lA down, 2. The sun wuz hot & good. I kould only C the sky + hear hr wrdz. She srprizd me.
She sed th@ we, az humnz, bear the brdn uv havng 2 B evry animl in the wrld rold in2 1.
She sed th@ we rEly hav no identiT uv our own.
She sed, "Wh@ iz human B-havior, X-ept tryng 2 proov th@ w'r not animalz?"
She sed, "I think we hav strAd so far awA from our animal originz th@ we R bent on kreATng a noo, soopra-animal idNtiT."
She sed, "Wh@ R komputrz but the EvryAnimalMashEn?"
I kouldn't B-lEv she wuz talkng like this. She wuz like an episode uv Star Trek made flesh. It wuz az if I wuz falng in2 a dEp, dEp hole az I hrd hr voiss speak 2 me. But then a bumbl-B bumbld abuv us & it stole our a10nshun the wA flyng thngz kan.
She sed, "Imagin B-ng a B + livng in a gr8 big hive. You would hav no idea th@ 2morow wuz going 2 B any difrent than 2dA. You kould retrn 2 th@ same hive 1,000 yearz latr & ther would B just the same prception uv 2morow az nevr B-ng any difrent. Humanz R kompletely difrent. We asoom 2morow iz anuthr wrld."
I askd hr wot she ment, + she sed, "I meen th@ the animalz liv in anuthr sens uv time. They kan nevr hav a sens uv history B-kuz they kan nevr C the difrenss B-twEn 2dA & 2morow."
I juggld sum smal rokz I found B-side me. She sed she didnt kno I kould juggl + I told hr it wuz sumthing I Irnd by ozmosis in my last produkt groop.
We got up & walkd 2gethr bak 2 Bildng 7. I pushd my bike. We walkd ovr the windng wite Cment path spekld with krow shit, past the fountun, + thru the hemlokz & frz.
* * *
I reread the Prince Version and realized th@ after a certain point, real language decomposes into encryption code; Japanese.
[Formatter's note: A full page of random-looking ascii - e.g. %-43]505)%1$])3D=$5D526524Y'0T]24D5#5$Q954Y&3U(@$)$#L!PZ
MONDAY
Dad got fired! Didn't we see that one coming a mile away. This whole restructuring business.
Mom phoned around 11:00 a.m. and she spent only ten minutes giving me the news. She had to get back to Dad, who was out on the back patio, in shock, looking out over Silicon Valley. She said we'll have to talk longer tomorrow. I got off the phone and my head was buzzing.
* * *
The results came in from the overnight stress tests - the tests we run to try to locate bugs in the code - and there were five breaks. Five! So I had my work cut out for me today. Nine days until shipping.
Right.
* * *
I telephoned Susan over in Mac Applications. The news about Dad was too important for e-mail, and we had lunch together in the big cafeteria in Building Sixteen that resembles the Food Fair at any halfway decent mall. Today was Mongolian sticky rice day.
Susan was hardly surprised about IBM dumping Dad. She told me that when she was briefly on the OS/2 version 1.0 team, they sent her to the IBM branch in Boca Raton for two weeks. Apparently IBM was asking people from the data entry department whether they wanted to train to be programmers.
"If they hadn't been doing boneheaded shit like that, your dad would still have a job."
* * *
I've been thinking: I get way too many pieces of e-mail, about 60 a day This is a typical number at Microsoft. E-mail is like highways - if you have them, traffic follows.
I'm an e-mail addict. Everybody at Microsoft is an addict. The future of e-mail usage is being pioneered right here. The cool thing with e-mail is that when you send it, there's no possibility of connecting with the person on the other end. It's better than phone answering machines, because with them, the person on the other line might actually pick up the phone and you might have to talk.
Typically, everybody has about a 40 percent immediate cull rate - those pieces of mail you can delete immediately because of a frivolous tag line. What you read of the remaining 60 percent depends on how much of a life you have. The less of a life, the more mail you read.
Abe has developed a "rules-based" software program that anticipates his e-mail preferences and sifts and culls accordingly. I guess that's sort of like Antonella's personal secretary program for cats.
* * *
After lunch, I drove down 156th Street to the Uwajima-Ya Japanese supermarket and bought Karla some seaweed and cucumber rolls. They also sell origami paper by the sheet there, so I threw in some cool colored papers as an extra bonus.
When I got back to the office, I knocked on Karla's door and gave her the rolls and the paper. She seemed glad enough to see me (she didn't scowl) and genuinely surprised that I had brought her something.
She asked me to sit in her office. She has a big poster of a MIPS chip blueprint on her wall and some purple and pink flowers in a bud vase, just like Mary Tyler Moore. She said that it was kind of me to bring her a Japanese seaweed roll and everything, but at the moment she was in the middle of a pack of Skittles. Would I like some?
And so we sat and ate Skittles. I told her about my dad and she just listened. And then she told me that her own father operates a small fruit cannery in Oregon. She said that she learned about coding from canning lines - or rather, she developed a fascination for linear logic processes there - and she actually has a degree in manufacturing processes, not computer programming. And she folded one of those origami birds for me. Her IQ must be about 800.
* * *
IQs are one of the weird things about Microsoft - you only find the right-hand side of the bell curve on-Campus. There's nobody who's two-digit. Just one more reason it's such a sci-fi place to work.
* * *
Anyway, we started talking more about all of the fiftysomethings being dumped out of the economy by downsizing. No one knows what to do with these people, and it's so sad, because being 50 nowadays isn't like being 50 a hundred years ago when you'd probably be dead.
I told Karla about Bug Barbecue's philosophy: If you can't make
yourself worthwhile to society, then that's your problem, not society's. Bug says people are personally responsible for keeping themselves relevant. Somehow, this doesn't seem quite right to me.
Karla speaks with such precision. It's so cool. She said that everyone worrying about rioting senior citizens is probably premature. She said that it's a characteristic of where we are right now on computer technology's ease-of-use curve that fiftysomethings are a bit slow at accepting technology.
"Our generation has all of the characteristics needed to be in the early-adopter group - time for school and no pesky unlearning to be done. But the barriers for user acceptance should be vanishing soon enough for fiftysomethings."
This made me feel better for Dad.
Michael came by just then to ask about a subroutine and I realized it was time for me to leave. Karla thanked me again for the food, and I was glad I had brought it along.
* * *
Caroline from the Word offices in Building Sixteen sent e-mail regarding the word "nerd." She says the word only came into vogue around the late '70s when Happy Days was big on TV - eerily the same time that the PC was being popularized. She said prior to that, there was no everyday application for the word, "and now nerds run the world!"
* * *
Abe said something interesting. He said that because everyone's so poor these days, the '90s will be a decade with no architectural legacy or style - everyone's too poor to put up new buildings. He said that code is the architecture of the '90s.
* * *
I walked by Michael's office around sundown, just before I left for home for a shower and a snack before coming back to stomp the bugs. He was playing a game on his monitor screen I'd never seen before.
I asked him what it was and he told me it was something he had designed himself. It was a game about a beautiful kingdom on the edge of the world that saw time coming to an end.
However, the kingdom had found a way to trick God. It did this by converting its world into code - into bits of light and electricity that would keep pace with time as it raced away from them. And thus the kingdom would live forever, after time had come to an end.
Michael said the citizens of the kingdom were allowed to do this because they had made it to the end of history without ever having had the blood of war spill on their soil. He said it would have been an affront to all good souls who had worked for a better world over the millennia not to engineer a system for preserving finer thoughts after the millennium arrived and all ideologies died and people became animals once more.
"Well," I said after he finished, "how about those Mariners!"
* * *
Oh - Abe bought a trampoline. He went to Costco to stock up on Jif, and he ended up buying a trampoline - 14-x-14-foot, 196 square feet of bouncy aerobic fun. Since when do grocery stores sell trampolines? What a screwy decade. I guess that's what it's like to be a millionaire.
The delivery guys dropped it off and around midnight we set it up in the front yard, over the crop circles, chaining one of the legs to the front railing. Bug Barbecue is already printing up a release he's going to make Abe have all the neighbors with kids sign, absolving Abe of any blame in the event of an accident.
TUESDAY
Woke up super early today, after only four hours' sleep, to a watery light outside. High overcast clouds. Through my window I saw a plane fly over the house, headed into SeaTac, and it made me remember when 747s first came out. Boeing had a PR photo of a kid building a house of cards in the lounge up in the bubble. God, I wanted to be that kid. Then I got to wondering, Why am I bothering to get up? What is the essential idea that gets me out of bed and through the day? What is it that gets anybody out of bed? I figure I still want to be that kid building a house of cards in a 747.
I sandpapered the roof of my mouth with three bowls of Cap'n Crunch - had raw gobbets of mouth-beef dangling onto my tongue all day. It hurt like crazy, and it made me talk with a Cindy Brady lisp until late afternoon.
* * *
Spent two hours in the morning trapped in a room with the Pol Pots from Marketing. God, they never stop - like we don't have anything better to do eight days before shipping. Even the bug testers. Like, we're supposed to see a box of free Dove Bars and say, "Oh - it's okay then - please, please waste my time."
I think everyone hates and dreads Marketing's meetings because of how these meetings alter your personality. At meetings you have to explain what you've accomplished, so naturally you fluff up your work a bit, like pillows on a couch. You end up becoming this perky, gung-ho version of yourself that you know is just revolting. I have noticed that everybody looks down upon the gung-ho type people at Microsoft, but nobody considers themselves gung-ho. They should just see themselves at these meetings, all frat boy and chipper. Fortunately, gung-ho-ishness seems confined exclusively to marketing meetings. Otherwise I think the Campus is utterly casual.
Oh, and sometimes you get flame meetings. They're fun, too - when everyone flames everyone else.
Today's meeting was about niggly little shipping details and was numbingly dull. And then, near the end, a Motorola pager owned by Kent, one of the Marketing guys, went off on top of the table. It buzzed like a hornet and shimmied and twitched across the table in a dance of death. It was mesmerizing, like watching a tarantula scamper across the table. It killed all conversation dead. Killed it right on the spot.
My smiling-muscles hurt as a result of the meeting. On top of my Cap'n Crunch mouth. A bad mouth day.
* * *
I called Mom right after the meeting and Dad answered the phone. I heard Oprah on in the background, and I didn't think that was a good omen. Dad sounded upbeat, but isn't that a part of the process? Denial? I asked him if he was watching Oprah and he said he had only come into the house for a snack.
Mom came on the phone on the extension, and once Dad was off the line, she confided that he barely slept the night before, and when he did, he made haunted moaning noises. And then this morning he dressed, as though headed to the office, and sat watching TV, being eerily chipper, refusing to talk about what his plans were. Then he went out into the garage to work on his model train world.
* * *
I learned a new word today: "trepanation" - drilling a hole in the skull to relieve pressure on the brain.
* * *
Karla came into my office this morning - a first - just as I was logging onto my e-mail for the morning. She was holding a big cardboard box full of acrylic Windows coffee mugs from the company store in Building Fourteen. "Guess what everyone in the Karla universe is getting for Christmas this year?" she asked cheerfully. "They're on sale." There was a pause. "You want one, Dan?"
I said that I drink too much coffee and colas, and that I'm a colon cancer statistic just waiting to happen. I said I'd love one. She handed it to me and there was a pause as she looked around my office: an NEC MultiSync monitor; a Compaq workhorse monitor; a framed Jazz poster; a "Mac Hugger" bumper sticker on my ceiling and my black-and-white photo shrine to Microsoft VP Steve Ballmer. "The shrine started as a joke," I said, "but it's sort of taking on a life of its own now. It's getting scary. Shall we worship?"
It was then that she asked me, in a lowered tone, "Who's Jed?"
She had seen me keyboard in my password - like HAL from 2001.
And so I closed the door and told her about Jed, and you know, I was glad I was able to tell someone at last.
* * *
Mid-afternoon, Bug, Todd, Michael, and I grabbed some road-Snapples in the kitchen and headed over to pick up some manuals at the library, out behind the Administration building. It was more of a fresh-air jaunt than anything else.
It was raining quite heavily, but Bug pulled his usual stunt. He made us all walk through the Campus's forest undergrowth instead of simply taking the pleasant winding path that meanders through the Campus trees - the Microsoft path that speaks of Wookiees and Smurfs amid the salal, ornamental plums, rhododendrons, Japanese maple, arbutus, huckleberry, hemloc
k, cedars, and firs.
Bug believes that Bill sits at his window in the Admin Building and watches how staffers walk across the Campus. Bug believes that Bill keeps note of who avoids the paths and uses the fastest routes to get from A to B, and that Bill rewards these devil-may-care trailblazers with promotions and stock, in the belief that their code will be just as innovative and dashing.
We all ended up soaking wet, with Oregon Grape stains on our Dockers by the time we got to the library, and on the way back we read the Riot Act and said that Bug had to stop geeking out and learn to enculturate, and that for his own good he should take the path - and he agreed. But we could see that it was killing Bug - literally killing him - to have to walk along the path past where Bill's office is supposed to be.
Todd toyed with Bug and got him going on the subject of Xerox PARC, thus getting Bug all bitter and foaming. Bug is still in a sort of perpetual grief that Xerox PARC dropped the football on so many projects.
And then Michael, who had been silent up to now, said, "Hey - if you cut over this berm, it's a little faster," and he cut off the path, and Bug's eyes just about popped out of his head, and Michael found a not bad shortcut. Right outside the Admin Building.
* * *
I realize I haven't seen a movie in six months. I think the last one was Curly Sue on the flight to Macworld Expo, and that hardly counted. I really need a life, bad.
* * *
It turns out Abe has entrepreneurial aspirations. We had dinner in the down stairs cafeteria together (Indonesian Bamay with frozen yogurt and double espresso). He's thinking of quitting and becoming a pixelation broker - going around to museums and buying the right to digitize their paintings. It's a very "Rich Microsoft" thing to do. Microsoft's millionaires are the first generation of North American nerd wealth.