Microserfs

by Douglas Coupland

  The inside of my head did a dip, like on a ride at Knott's Berry Farm. I found myself saying, "Michael's not Jed, Dad. He just isn't. And neither am I. And I just can't keep trying to keep up with him. Because no matter how hard I run, I'm never going to catch up."

  "Oh, my boy . . ."

  My head was between my legs at this point, and I had to keep my eyes closed, because the light from the piazza was hurting me, and I wondered if this was how Ethan's eyes felt on his antidepressant chemicals, and then I started thinking of a small plastic swimming pool Jed and I used to play in when we were babies, and I think my mind was misfiring. And then I felt my father's arms around my shoulders, and I shivered, and he pulled me close to him.

  I was too sick, and Dad's words weren't registering. "You and your friends helped me once when I was lost. The whole crew of you - your casual love and help - saved me at a time when no one else could save me.

  And now I can help you. I was lost, Daniel. If it weren't for you and your friends, I would never have found the green spaces or the still waters. My mind would not now be calm . . ."

  But I don't remember what I said next. I have faint memories - my arms touching the warm cement - of a stop sign - of a sago palm branch brushing my cheek; my father's worried face looking forward right above my own; the clouds above his head; birds in the trees; my father's arms beneath me; depositing me within the Lego garden; my mother saying, "Dear?" and my father's voice saying, "It's okay, honey. He just needs to sleep for a long, long time."

  5

  TrekPolitiks

  MONDAY

  January 17,1994

  An earthquake hit Los Angeles at 4:31 this morning and the images began arriving via CNN right away. Karla and I stayed home to watch, and when Ethan, a Simi Valley boy, heard about it on the radio driving in from San Carlos, he ran right through our front yard's sprinkler to watch our TV. (His own Cablevision bill remains unpaid.) Damage seemed to be localized but extreme - the San Fernando Valley, Northridge, Van Nuys, and parts of Santa Monica and Pacific Palisades.

  "The freeways!" moaned Ethan. "My beloved freeways - Antelope Valley, ripped and torn, the 405, rubble - the Santa Monica freeway at La Cienega - all collapsed."

  We'd never seen Ethan cry. At the sight of some particularly devastated overpass, he told me, "I kissed my first date beside that off-ramp - we'd sit on the embankments and watch the cars go by."

  Anyway, it really did make us sad to see all of this glorious infrastructure in ruins, like a crippled giant. We ate breakfast, leafed through the Handbook of Highway Engineering (1975), and watched all the collapsed structures.

  Mom made us hot chocolate before she went to the library and then dropped us off at the office on her way. Ethan was a mess all day.

  * * *

  Dad quit his night course in C++ because all of the kids in his class were seventeen and they just stared at him and didn't think he could be a student because he was too old. The students were saying things to each other like, "If he conies too close to you shout, 'You're not my father!' as loud as you can." Kids are so cruel.

  So we're going to teach Dad C++ instead.

  * * *

  Random moment: This afternoon I was in the McDonald's on El Camino Real near California Street and they had this Lucite box with a slot on top where people put their business cards. It was stuffed with cards. Really stuffed.

  But the weird thing was, I couldn't locate anything on the box saying what the cards were to be used for. So I guess it's just this human instinct to stick your business card in a slot. Like you're going to win . . . what - a free orange drink machine for your birthday party? I saw a woman's card from Hewlett-Packard and a card from some guy in Mexico saying "Graduate from Stanford Graduate School of Business." Here's this Stanford graduate at McDonald's putting his card in a box at random. I just don't understand people sometimes. Didn't he learn anything at Stanford?

  * * *

  Geek party tonight. Relief! Without geek parties, we'd never see anybody but OURSELVES, day in, day out. And the big news of the day was that Karla and I found a place to house-sit - it belongs to a woman who got the layoff package from Apple. We move in this weekend (yayyy!), and the move comes as some relief as the Karla/Mom not communicating thing is oddly wearing on all of us.

  The party: It was in San Francisco (the "sit-tay," as now cooler-than-us-by-virtue-of-living-there Bug and Susan call it), in Noe Valley at Ann and Jorge's, Anatole's friends. Jorge's with Sun Microsystems and Ann's with 3DO. There were LARGE quantities of delicious, snobby San Francisco food, great liquor, industry gossip, and TVs displaying earthquake damage all over the apartment. Since us Oop!sters are all broke, we saved pots of money by not eating all day before the party. We never eat before geek parties.

  * * *

  In the moneyed world of Silicon Valley, nothing is uncooler than being broke. Karla and I were both curious to see how Ann and Jorge live. When we arrived, I was overwhelmed by the hipness factor. And where are the GEEKS? Everyone was dressed. . . like real people. Where were the ironic fridge magnets? The futons? The IKEA furniture? The Nerf products? The house looked as though it had been made over by Martha Stewart. There were REAL couches, obviously purchased NEW, in red velvet with gold and silver silk throw pillows; Matisse-derived area rugs; little candles everywhere; a REAL dining table with SIX chairs around it in its OWN ROOM with vases and bowls full of pine cones on the mantel. These people were like ADULTS . . . seamless!

  Susan said they've merely disguised their evidence of not having a life: "I mean, it's like you go to somebody's house for Thanksgiving and they've spent eighteen hours covering the rooms with little orange squashes and quinces and crepe paper, and the meal is like Henry the Eighth, and you can't eat because you get this creepy sick feeling that the person who did the dinner has nothing else to do with their life. It's the dark side of Martha Stewart's Living."

  Ethan said Susan still felt guilty for putting too much work and money into our gift baskets at Christmas.

  I thought that overdecoration and nice houses might be the regional version of the never-used kayak in the garage up at Microsoft. But a darker thought emerged: these may possibly be techies who HAVE A LIFE, and they're upping the ante for the rest of us.

  Susan, in spite of ragging on the decor with us, started fellating our hostess, Ann, over the subject of houses. They were talking about some expensive store in Pacific Heights where no doubt all of this furniture comes from.

  Ann: "Fillamento, it's on Fillmore and Sacramento. They have the best stuff, I just got this amazing coverlet for our bed there. They had to special-order it from Germany, but it is so gorgeous . . . do you want to see it?"

  Susan: "Of course!"

  Off they went, comparing decor purchases. You'd never know that Ann used to be a chip designer.

  * * *

  The local rage is obscure, expensive premium vodkas - it's the litmus of cool at geek parties. Later on, Susan, Karla, and I were standing around drinking Ketel-1, when some guy who'd been checking Karla out came up and said, "Hi, I'm Phil, I'm a PDA."

  PDAs are what Newton is - it's an acronym for Personal Digital

  Assistant.

  "You look more analog than digital," Susan oh-so-wittily batted back at

  him.

  "It stands for Peons Down at Apple!" Phil chortled, ignoring Susan, and zooming in on KARLA. It was really embarrassing, because Susan wasn't picking up on the fact that she was being ignored by Phil. Karla was grossed out by Phil, and I was on red alert about this big hulk zooming in on Karla. I inserted myself between him and Karla. "Maybe it stands for Public Display of Affection." I put my arm around Karla and introduced everybody.

  Susan was laughing at Phil's jokes - she's so desperate for a dating architecture in her life, and when Phil turned around Karla mouthed the words: REMOVE HIM FROM MY LIFE to Susan, then grabbed my shoulder, and we went off to the den to marvel at the amount of stuff owned by our hosts. We felt like East Germans v
isiting West Germany for the first time. Phil, meanwhile, sensing defeat, finally noticed Susan, and began chatting her up.

  For the next hour, we watched Phil regale Susan with exciting tales of product meetings, shipping deadlines, engineering crises, and code names for products.

  * * *

  I can't stop marveling at how together geeks are in the Valley. At Microsoft, there was no peer pressure to do anything except work and ship on time. If you did, you got a Ship-it Award. Easy. Black and White.

  Here, it's so much more complicated - you're supposed to have an exciting, value-adding job that utilizes your creativity, a wardrobe from Nordstrom's or at the very least Banana Republic, a $400,000 house, a cool European or Japanese car, the perfect relationship with someone as ambitious, smart, and well-dressed as yourself, and extra money to throw parties so that the whole world can observe what a life you have, indeed. It makes me miss Redmond, but at the same time, it is kind of inspiring. I feel conflicted.

  Even Michael noticed, with a rare lapse into pop culture: "Perhaps David Byrne was talking about the geeks inheriting the earth in that Talking Heads song, 'This is not my beautiful house! This is not my beautiful wife! My God! How did I get here ?' "

  Bug talked to a guy who's a game producer at a company called PF

  Magic. (What's up with all of these companies named "Magic"? Is it some-New Age/George Lucas-type deal or what! Uniquely Northern Californian.) Bug thinks the guy might be gay, but it was hard to tell. "All the guys around here dress well enough to have their heterosexuality be suspect . . . it's not very helpful for me."

  Bug has done a little damage himself over at the Stanford Shopping Center, as part of his new program to "become enculturated into my new lifestyle."

  It would be so weird to all of a sudden have to take ail of the myths and stereotypes and information about another kind of sexual orientation and somehow wade through them in order to construct yourself within that image. Susan's kind of doing it, too, but within heterosexuality - all of a sudden she's a Sexual Being, and I think she's having to learn as much about sex as Bug is, even though theoretically she's been heterosexual all her life.

  Many geeks don't really have a sexuality - they just have work. I think the sequence is that they get jobs at Microsoft or wherever right out of school, and they're so excited to have this "real" job and money that they just figure that the relationships will naturally happen, but then they wake up and they're thirty and they haven't had sex in eight years. There are always these flings at conferences and trade shows, and everyone brags about them, but nothing seems to emerge from them and life goes back to the primary relationship: Geek and Machine.

  It's like male geeks don't know how to deal with real live women, so they just assume it's a user interface problem. Not their fault. They'll just wait for the next version to come out - something more "user friendly."

  * * *

  Ethan got through to his parents on a cellular phone around sunset; he learned they were having the grandest of times, barbecuing burgers and corn on the front lawn, and meeting their neighbors for the first time in years. "Mom said the Ronald Reagan Library was untouched. Like I care."

  I think he wanted more drama. I think he would have been happier to hear that his mother was pinioned beneath a collapsed chimney, trickling blood into the phone receiver held up to her ear by his father.

  * * *

  Todd didn't come to the party. He was out on an actual, real, genuine, not-fake, date-style DATE tonight.

  * * *

  I'm coming to the conclusion about the human subconscious . . . that, no matter how you look at it, machines really are our subconscious. I mean, people from outer space didn't come down to earth and make machines for us . . . we made them ourselves. So machines can only be products of our being, and as such, windows into our souls . . . by monitoring the machines we build, and the sorts of things we put into them, we have this amazingly direct litmus as to how we are evolving.

  * * *

  Champaign-Urbana

  Her parents are engineers but that wasn't enough to keep them together.

  Pull the wires from the wall

  Chelyabinsk-70

  TUESDAY

  Shake-up: Todd has begun seeing a female body builder named Dusty, so I guess Armageddon can only be a little ways away. And here's the freaky part - Dusty codes! She's done systems for Esprit and Smith & Hawken. But she's the uncodiest female I've ever met.

  "We met at the protein drink sales case at Gold's Gym," beamed Todd, showcasing Dusty, who emerged into our office like a Close Encounter of the Third Kind. "Dusty," Todd called, "strike the pose!" From offstage a ghetto blaster pumped out thwomping lipstick-commercial Eurodisco.

  Dusty - late twenties or early thirties, with titanium hamstrings (and perhaps too much time spent in tanning booths) in ragged fringed hotpants and a ripped T-shirt commenced vogueing official International Bodybuilding Federation poses. We gaped openly. Such brazen posing!

  Dusty then grabbed Misty, who Mom brought downtown and then promptly left with us while she did some shopping, and twirled her by the paws in circles above our office's Lego garden. All that was missing were popping flash bulbs and a smoke machine, and Misty, unused to being picked up in such a manner, was blissed and became Dusty's instant lifelong fan.

  Dusty put down the now-dizzy Misty and said, "Yeah . . ." in a Chesterfields-smoked-through-a-tracheotomy-slit voice (Dusty gets her voice from barking out aerobics commands, which, Todd informs us, she teaches) ". . . all those big plastic tubs of branch-chain protein growth formula with gold lettering - Toddy and me were fighting for the last container of MetMax."

  Their eyes met and they squeezed each other's hands - it's a good thing they like each other, because otherwise it would be like two monster trucks chewing each other up at the KingDome.

  * * *

  Karla and Susan were being catty about Dusty:

  Karla: "Dusty - sounds like the name of someone who rides in a radio station traffic news-copter."

  Susan: "She looks like she just escaped from an Ice-Follies Smurfs-on-Ice mall show - tousled mall hair, spandex, and perky perma-smile."

  Michael closed his door. He doesn't like this side of human nature, but later Karla said it's because he's attracted to super-strong women. "Trust me," she said. "I can tell these things.''

  * * *

  Ethan is building a Lego freeway cloverleaf. Once it's finished, he's going to smash it and repair it. He's been horrified by the Northridge quake in Los Angeles. He's indeed a Valley boy.

  At a Canon photocopy shop he enlarged a news wire photo of the collapsed Antelope Valley freeway to up to wall-sized and hung it in the office as a model to build from. I suppose he should have used the money to pay his CABLE BILL, but Karla thinks he likes to have an excuse to visit us more at the office.

  Michael wisely allows no cable in the office and has forbidden us from playing Melrose Place and hockey fight dubs on the office VCR unit.

  Ethan has already demolished the Wilshire Modernist block of the Palo Alto City Hall Dad constructed.

  "Reconstruction is part of the plan," said Ethan, and Dad, although miffed, took pity on Ethan and decided not to get huffy.

  * * *

  We LOVE our new office and we no longer have to worry about rubbing our fingers on surfaces and finding accumulations of Ethan's dead scalp particles. Dad has a Dustbuster mounted on the wall. We also have SPACE.

  * * *

  Nobody scored last night. Susan got Phil's phone number and Bug got the PF Magic guy's number, even though he's not sure if he's straight or not. The 1990s!

  Susan was a bit sheepish around me and Karla, because she knows Phil is a loser, and she knows that we know.

  * * *

  Tech moment: we have our own Internet domain and are subservient to nobody. Our house is wired directly to the Net with a mail-order 486 using Linux on a 14.4 modem with a SLIP connection to the Little Garden (an Internet service prov
ider down here). I am now daniel@oop.com.

  "@" could become the "Me" or "Mac" of the next millennium.

  * * *

  Surprise: Mom told me that Dad's been looking for work elsewhere - and that Michael knows about it. "He needs to be among his own kind, dear."

  * * *

  Actually, today was just a big waste of a day, work-wise. I didn't get anything done because I had too many interruptions. I'd start to do something, then I'd be distracted by something else, forget what I was doing in the first place, and then get so worried that I wasn't getting anything done, that it wrecked even further my ability to get anything done. Sometimes too much communication is too much communication. I should rent a Nature video and relax, but instead, tonight we rented The Poseidon Adventure and watched the ship turning upside down scene over and over about fifty times and then we rented Earthquake and watched LA dismantle itself about fifty times, frame-by-frame.

  Mom was in the breakfast nook typing a letter to her sister on an IBM Selectric and we got into an argument about whether anybody made them anymore. Maybe in Malaysia.

  WEDNESDAY

  Dusty is now working with us! Michael hired her under the condition that she devote herself to the company and confine her body experimentation to off-hours - as well as to forgo aerobic instruction moonlighting altogether until shipping. "And no smart drugs!" said Michael. "Not that it's my business, but smart drugs turn people into Tasmanian Devils, not Einsteins."

  "Touché, Michelangelo," said Dusty. "That's French for meow." She has a hard time calling anybody by their real name.

  Dusty was trying on a new marigold yellow posing bikini she's hoping to wear in this Fall's Iron Rose IV Competition in San Diego. Dusty herself was the color of a roasted turkey.