Microserfs

by Douglas Coupland

* * *

  Susan taped laser-printed notes on all of our bedroom doors reminding us about the vesting party this Thursday ("Vest Fest '93"), which was a subliminal hint to us to clean up the place. Most of us work in Building Seven; shipping hell has brought a severe breakdown in cleanup codes.

  * * *

  Susan is 26 and works in Mac Applications. If Susan were a Jeopardy! contestant, her dream board would be:

  • 680X0 assembly language

  • Cats

  • Early '80s haircut bands

  • "My secret affair with Rob in the Excel Group"

  • License plate slogans of America

  • Plot lines from The Monkees

  •The death of IBM

  * * *

  Susan's an IBM brat and hates that company with a passion. She credits it with ruining her youth by transferring her family eight times before she graduated from high school - and the punchline is that the company gave her father the boot last year during a wave of restructuring. So nothing too evil can happen to IBM in her eyes. Her graphic designer friend made up T-shirts saying "IBM: Weak as a Kitten, Dumb as a Sack of Hammers." We all wear them. I gave one to Dad last Christmas but his reaction didn't score too high on the chuckle-o-meter. (I am not an IBM brat - Dad was teaching at the University of Western Washington until the siren of industry lured him to Palo Alto in 1985. It was very '80s.)

  Susan's a real coding machine. But her abilities are totally wasted reworking old code for something like the Norwegian Macintosh version of Word 5.8. Susan's work ethic best sums up the ethic of most of the people I've met who work at Microsoft. If I recall her philosophy from the conversation she had with her younger sister two weekends ago, it goes something like this:

  "It's never been, 'We're doing this for the good of society.' It's always been us taking an intellectual pride in putting out a good product - and making money. If putting a computer on every desktop and in every home didn't make money, we wouldn't do it."

  That sums up most of the Microsoft people I know.

  * * *

  Microsoft, like any office, is a status theme park. Here's a quick rundown:

  • Profitable projects are galactically higher in status than loser (not quite as profitable) projects.

  • Microsoft at Work (Digital Office) is sexiest at the moment. Fortune 500 companies are drooling over DO because it'll allow them to downsize

  millions of employees. Basically, DO allows you to operate your fax, phone, copier - all of your office stuff - from your PC.

  • Cash cows like Word are profitable but not really considered cutting

  edge.

  • Working on-Campus is higher status than being relegated to one of the off-Campus Siberias.

  • Having Pentium-driven hardware (built to the hilt) in your office is higher status than having 486 droneware.

  • Having technical knowledge is way up there.

  • Being an architect is also way up there.

  • Having Bill-o-centric contacts is way, way up there.

  • Shipping your product on time is maybe the coolest (insert wave of anxiety here). If you ship on time you get a Ship-It award: a 12-x-15-x-l-inch Lucite slab - but you have to pretend it's no big deal. Michael has a Ship-It award and we've tried various times to destroy it - blowtorching, throwing it off the verandah, dousing it with acetone to dissolve it - nothing works. It's so permanent, it's frightening.

  * * *

  More roommate profiles:

  First, Abe. If Abe were a Jeopardy! contestant, his seven dream categories would be:

  • Intel assembly language

  • Bulk shopping

  •C++

  • Introversion

  • "I love my aquarium"

  • How to have millions of dollars and not let it affect your life in any way

  • Unclean laundry

  * * *

  Abe is sort of like the household Monopoly-game banker. He collects our monthly checks for the landlord, $235 apiece. The man has millions and he rents! He's been at the group house since 1984, when he was hired fresh out of MIT. (The rest of us have been here, on average, about eight months apiece.) After ten years of writing code, Abe so far shows no signs of getting a life. He seems happy to be reaching the age of 30 in just four months with nothing to his name but a variety of neat-o consumer electronics and boxes of Costco products purchased in rash moments of Costco-scale madness ("Ten thousand straws! Just think of it - only $10 and I'll never need to buy straws ever again!") These products line the walls of his room, giving it the feel of an air-raid shelter.

  Bonus detail: There are dried-out patches of sneeze spray all over Abe's monitors. You'd think he could afford 24 bottles of Windex.

  * * *

  Next, Todd. Todd's seven Jeopardy! categories would be:

  • Your body is your temple

  • Baseball hats

  • Meals made from combinations of Costco products

  • Psychotically religious parents

  • Frequent and empty sex

  • SEGA Genesis gaming addiction

  • The Supra

  * * *

  Todd works as a tester with me. He's really young - 22 - the way Microsoft employees all used to be. His interest is entirely in girls, bug testing, his Supra, and his body, which he buffs religiously at the Pro Club gym and feeds with peanut butter quesadillas, bananas, and protein drinks.

  Todd is historically empty. He neither knows nor cares about the past. He reads Car and Driver and fields three phone calls a week from his parents who believe that computers are "the Devil's voice box," and who try to persuade him to return home to Port Angeles and speak with the youth pastor.

  Todd's the most fun of all the house members because he is all impulse and no consideration. He's also the only roomie to have clean laundry consistently. In a crunch you can always borrow an unsoiled shirt from Todd.

  * * *

  Bug Barbecue's seven Jeopardy! categories would be:

  • Bitterness

  • Xerox PARC nostalgia

  • Macintosh products

  • More bitterness

  • Psychotic loser friends

  • Jazz

  • Still more bitterness

  * * *

  Bug Barbecue is the World's Most Bitter Man. He is (as his name implies) a tester with me at Building Seven. His have-a-life factor is pretty near zero. He has the smallest, darkest room in the house, in which he maintains two small shrines: one to his Sinclair ZX-81, his first computer, and the other to supermodel Elle MacPherson. Man, she'd freak if she saw the hundreds of little photos - the coins, the candles, the little notes.

  Bug is 31, and he lets everyone know it. If we ever ask him so much as "Hey, Bug - have you seen volume 7 of my Inside Mac?" he gives a sneer and replies, "You're obviously of the generation that never built their own motherboard or had to invent their own language."

  Hey, Bug - we love you, too.

  Bug never gets offered stock by the company. When payday comes and the little white stock option envelopes with red printing reading "Personal and Confidential" end up in all of our pigeonholes, Bug's is always, alas, empty. Maybe they're trying to get rid of him, but it's almost impossible to fire someone at Microsoft. It must drive the administration nuts. They hired 3,100 people in 1992 alone, and you know not all of them were gems.

  Oddly, Bug is fanatical in his devotion to Microsoft. It's as if the more they ignore him, the more rabidly he defends their honor. And if you cherish your own personal time, you will not get into a discussion with him over the famous Look-&-Feel lawsuit or any of the FTC or Department of Justice actions:

  "These litigious pricks piss me off. I wish they'd compete in the marketplace where it really counts instead of being little wusses and whining for government assistance to compete. . . ."

  You've been warned.

  * * *

  Finally, Michael. Michael's seven Jeopardy! categories would be:


  • FORTRAN

  • Pascal

  • Ada (defense contracting code)

  •LISP

  • Neil Peart (drummer for Rush)

  • Hugo and Nebula award winners

  • Sir Lancelot

  * * *

  Michael is probably the closest I'll ever come to knowing someone who lives in a mystical state. He lives to assemble elegant streams of code instructions. He's like Mozart to everyone else's Salieri - he enters people's offices where lines of code are written on the dry-erase whiteboards and quietly optimizes the code as he speaks to them, as though someone had written wrong instructions on how to get to the beach and he was merely setting them right so they wouldn't get lost.

  He often uses low-tech solutions to high-tech problems: Popsicle sticks, rubber bands, and little strips of paper that turn on a bent coat hanger frame help him solve complex matrix problems. When he moved offices into his new window office (good coder, good office), he had to put Post-it notes reading "Not Art" on his devices so that the movers didn't stick them under the glass display cases out in the central atrium area.

  SUNDAY

  This morning before heading to the office I read an in-depth story about Burt and Loni's divorce in People magazine. Thus, 1,474,819 brain cells that could have been used toward a formula for world peace were obliterated. Are computer memory and human memory analogous? Michael would know.

  * * *

  Mid-morning, I mountain-hiked over to Nintendo headquarters, across Interstate 520 from Microsoft.

  Now, I've never been to the South African plant of, say, Sandoz Pharmaceuticals, but I bet it looks a lot like Nintendo headquarters - two-story industrial-plex buildings sheathed with Death Star-black windows and landscape trees around the parking lot seemingly clicked into place with a mouse. It's nearly identical to Microsoft except Microsoft uses sea foam-green glass on its windows and has big soccer fields should it ever really need to expand.

  I Hacky Sacked for a while with my friend, Marty, and some of his tester friends during their break. Sunday is a big day for the kids who man the PSS phone lines there because all of young America is out of school and using the product. It's really young at Nintendo. It's like the year 1311, where everyone over 35 is dead or maimed and out of sight and mind.

  All of us got into this big discussion about what sort of software dogs would design if they could. Marty suggested territory-marking programs with piss simulators and lick interfaces. Antonella thought of BoneFinder. Harold thought of a doghouse remodeling CAD system. All very cartographic/high sensory: lots of visuals.

  Then, of course, the subject of catware came up. Antonella suggested a personal secretary program that tells the world, "No, I do not wish to be petted. Oh, and hold all my calls." My suggestion was for a program that sleeps all the time.

  Anyway, it's a good thing we're human. We design business spreadsheets, paint programs, and word processing equipment. So that tells you where we're at as a species. What is the search for the next great compelling application but a search for the human identity?

  * * *

  It was nice being at Nintendo where everybody's just a little bit younger and hipper than at Microsoft and actually takes part in the Seattle scene. Everyone at Microsoft seems, well, literally 31.2 years old, and it kind of shows.

  There's this eerie, science-fiction lack of anyone who doesn't look exactly 31.2 on the Campus. It's oppressive. It seems like only last week the entire Campus went through Gap ribbed-T mania together - and now they're all shopping for the same 3bdrm/2bth dove-gray condo in Kirkland.

  Microserfs are locked by nature into doing 31.2-ish things: the first house, the first marriage, the "where-am-I-going" crisis, the out-goes-the-Miata/in-comes-the-minivan thing, and, of course, major death denial. A Microsoft VP died of cancer a few months ago, and it was like, you weren't allowed lo mention it. Period. The three things you're not allowed to discuss at work: death, salaries, and your stock options.

  I'm 26 and I'm just not ready to turn 31.2 yet.

  * * *

  Actually, I've been thinking about this death denial business quite a bit lately. September always makes me think of Jed. It's as if there's this virtual Jed who might have been. Sometimes I see him when I'm driving by water; I see him standing on a log boom smiling and waving; I see him buckaroo-ing a killer whale in the harbor off downtown while I'm stuck in traffic on the Alaskan Way viaduct. Or I see him walking just ahead of me around the Space Needle restaurant, always just around the curve.

  I'd like to hope Jed is happy in the afterworld, but because I was raised without any beliefs, I have no pictures of an afterworld for myself. In the past I have tried to convince myself that there is no life after death, but I have found myself unable to do this, so I guess intuitively I feel there is something. But I just don't know how to begin figuring out what these pictures are.

  Over the last few weeks I've been oh-so-casually asking the people I know about their own pictures of the afterworld. I can't simply come right out and ask directly because, as I say, you just don't discuss death at Microsoft.

  The results were pretty dismal. Ten people asked, and not one single image. Not one single angel or one bright light or even one single, miserable barbecue briquette. Zero.

  Todd was more concerned about who would show up at his funeral.

  Bug Barbecue told me all this depressing stuff, of how the constituent elements of his personality weren't around before he was born, so why should he worry about what happens to them afterward?

  Susan changed the topic entirely. ("Hey, isn't Louis Gerstner hopeless?")

  * * *

  Sometimes, in the employee kitchen, when I'm surrounded by the dairy cases full of Bill-supplied free beverages, I have to wonder if maybe Microsoft's corporate zest for recycling aluminum, plastic, and paper is perhaps a sublimation of the staff's hidden desire for immortality. Or maybe this whole Bill thing is actually the subconscious manufacture of God.

  * * *

  After Nintendo I mountain-biked around the Campus, delaying my venture into shipping hell. I saw a cluster of Deadheads looking for magic mushrooms out on the west lawn beside the second-growth forest. Fall is just around the corner.

  The trees around Campus are dropping their leaves. It's been strange weather this spring and summer. The newspaper says the trees are confused and they're shedding early this year.

  * * *

  Todd was out on the main lawn training with the Microsoft intramural Frisbee team. I said hello. Everyone looked so young and healthy. I realized that Todd and his early-20s cohorts are the first Microsoft generation - the first group of people who have never known a world without an MS-DOS-less environment. Time ticks on.

  They're also the first generation of Microsoft employees faced with reduced stock options and, for that matter, plateauing stock prices. I guess that makes them mere employees, just like at any other company. Bug Barbecue and I were wondering last week what's going to happen when this new crop of workers reaches its inevitable Seven-Year Programmer's Burnout. At the end of it they won't have two million dollars to move to Hilo and start up a bait shop with, the way the Microsoft old-timers did. Not everyone can move into management.

  Discarded.

  Face it: You're always just a breath away from a job in telemarketing. Everybody I know at the company has an estimated time of departure and they're all within five years. It must have been so weird - living the way my Dad did - thinking your company was going to take care of you forever.

  * * *

  A few minutes later I bumped into Karla walking across the west lawn. She walks really quickly and she's so small, like a little kid.

  It was so odd for both of us, seeing each other outside the oatmeal walls and oyster carpeting of the office. We stopped and sat on the lawn and talked for a while. We shared a feeling of conspiracy by not being inside helping with the shipping deadline.

  I asked her if she was looking for 'shrooms with the
Deadheads, but she said she was going nuts in her office, and she just had to be in the wild for a few minutes in the forest beside the Campus. I thought this was such an unusual aspect of her personality, I mean, because she's so mousy and indoorsy-looking. It was good to see her and for once to not have her yelling at me to stop being a nuisance. We've worked maybe ten offices apart for half a year, and we've never once really talked to each other.

  I showed Karla some birch bark I'd peeled off a tree outside Building Nine and she showed me some scarlet sumac leaves she had found in the forest. I told her about the discussion Marty, Antonella, Harold, and I had been having about dogs and cats over at Nintendo's staff picnic tables. She lay down on the ground and thought about this, so I lay down, too. The sun was hot and good. I could only see the sky and hear her words. She surprised me.

  She said that we, as humans, bear the burden of having to be every animal in the world rolled into one.

  She said that we really have no identity of our own.

  She said, "What is human behavior, except trying to prove that we're not animals?"

  She said, "I think we have strayed so far away from our animal origins that we are bent on creating a new, supra-animal identity."

  She said, "What are computers but the EveryAnimalMachine?"

  I couldn't believe she was talking like this. She was like an episode of Star Trek made flesh. It was as if I was falling into a deep, deep hole as I heard her voice speak to me. But then a bumblebee bumbled above us and it stole our attention the way flying things can.

  She said, "Imagine being a bee and living in a great big hive. You would have no idea that tomorrow was going to be any different than today. You could return to that same hive a thousand years later and there would be just the same perception of tomorrow as never being any different. Humans are completely different. We assume tomorrow is another world."

  I asked her what she meant, and she said, "I mean that the animals live in another sense of time. They can never have a sense of history because they can never see the difference between today and tomorrow."