Microserfs

by Douglas Coupland

  *UH OH*.

  But then, Susan's the obsessive type, too. So they're a pair.

  * * *

  Mom and I took Misty for a morning walk today and Mom was chattier than usual. Her work at the seniors home has her thinking quite a bit, it seems. Between the seniors home, swimming, the library, and Dad, she's so busy nowadays.

  In order to keep up with "us kids," Mom's been reading (and clipping) yet more articles about this @$&*%!! Information Superhighway. The enormity of her clipping enthusiasm seems to have made the issue penetrate her consciousness. She was asking me about brains and memories.

  I wasn't about to go into Karla's theories of the body and memory storage because discussing my body with my mother is something I'm simply unable to do. But I did say, "There's one thing computing teaches you, and that's that there's no point to remembering everything. Being able to find things is what's important."

  "What about if you don't use a memory often enough, then. If a memory isn't used enough, does it become irretrievable?"

  "Well - aside from proton decay and cosmic rays eliminating connections, I think memories are always there. They just get . . . unfindable. Think of memory loss as a forest fire. It's natural. You shouldn't really be afraid. Think of the flowers that grow where the land had just been

  destroyed."

  "Your grandfather had Alzheimer's. Did you know that? Maybe I

  shouldn't be telling you this."

  "I already knew. Dad told me about it years ago. Was it fast?"

  "Worse - slow."

  Misty became instant friends with a passing jogger who had been taking

  her pulse. Dogs have it so easy.

  Mom said, "I've been wondering if maybe our time here on earth has been protracted out for too long - by science - and wondering if maybe it's not a bad thing to expire before our government-waranteed 71.5 years have elapsed."

  "Mom, this isn't one of those 'I-have-cancer' talks, is it?"

  "God, no. It's just that seeing all those old people at work, so lonely and forgetful and all - it makes me have some dark thoughts. That's all. Oh listen to me natter. How selfish."

  Mom was always taught that other people's problems were more important than her own.

  "Anything else . . . ?" I asked.

  "And now I'm wondering. That's all."

  "Wondering what?"

  "I seem to feel myself losing . . . myself. This sounds so bored-housewife. But I'm not bored. But I have problems, too." I asked her what they were, but she said that problems were best not spoken of, and this is, perhaps, my family's main problem. "I'm joining a metaphysical discussion group."

  "That's it?"

  "You don't think I'm nutty?" (I have never heard anybody use the word "nutty" unironically before, and there was a satellite-link pause before I could say, "God no!" Karla and I have a metaphysical discussion group between ourselves almost every night.)

  "Of course not."

  * * *

  Spent the latter part of the day set on "WANDER," cruising this glorious Bay with Karla. The freeways - they're so gorgeous - the 280 cresting the big hill going north, past all the Pacifica and Daly City exits; the Highway 92 cloverleaf to Hayward and Half Moon Bay off the 101. So sensual, so infinite, so full of promise.

  Walking through the paddocks - we did the running-across-the-field-in-slow-motion-toward-each-other thing; we toyed with the bioanimatronic singing vegetable booth at Molly Stone's on California Street. Then we looked for an Italian restaurant so we could reenact the classic Lady and the Tramp spaghetti noodle/kiss scene.

  * * *

  During dinner we discussed encryption. I got to wondering what a paragraph with no vowels would look like, remembering that when Ethan first met Michael, at the Chili's restaurant, Michael was busy deleting vowels on the menu. So later on I'm going to experiment with this.

  * * *

  Abe:

  It stopped raining today, so I wnet out and bounced around on the trampoline. But it wansn't the same without Bug standing on the sidelines outlining quadripoligeia in exquisite detail.

  I wonder if maybe I don't talk to enough humans in a given day . . . I have a few casual interactions, but nothing really. And people I'm technically close with, like my family . . . I don't discuss deep things with them, either.

  Anyways, it seeems okay for us to talk abuout things. I've never really done this before. And sometimes I feel kind of lost. There - I've revealed too much. I'm going to send you this before I can stop myself.

  * * *

  Barbecue dinner tonight chez Mom and Dad.

  We were discussing the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) held every January in Las Vegas and every July in Chicago, and Mom asked us why CES is so important, and Ethan, disdaining food, plucking a grapefruit from a tree beside the wisteria vine, replied pronto. He's so nice to my mother. They get along so well. But he's not Eddie Haskell nice. He's just nice nice. He's also an information leaf blower:

  "The CES began as an annual Las Vegas car speaker and pornography trade show. It only incidentally began showcasing video games in the early 1980s. Games were considered a sideline novelty and have only recently been revealed as the passageway for the future of the human race. Editorials aside, in Las Vegas at CES you have what's called the 'Demo Derby.' Companies like us have to have a working demo of our products to show the outlets - Toys-R-Us, Blockbuster, and Target - as well as business plans and market research. As well you have what are called 'product sneaks' - you show the press your product so you can attract potential licensee software developers as well as drum up new business. I've been to eighteen CES shows. They make or break you."

  After this, Susan said, "You'd think I was at Sea World and had asked Ethan about Shamu's feeding habits. How does he remember this stuff? He just reels it off."

  * * *

  Bug has broken up with Jeremy, who he says is too politicized and too extreme. He was fairly open about it with Karla and me.

  "Jeremy wanted me to be just like him, which wouldn't be so bad, except he's just like all of his friends. It's like Coeur d'Alene all over again - except with pasta and better defined pectorals. And it doesn't annoy me that Jeremy wants me to be just like him. That's actually kind of nice. But what bothers me is that Jeremy is just essentially not like me, and we're too disparate to ever be in sync. I thought, you know, dating would be a bit easier. It's not. And what's truly freaky is realizing I'm vulnerable to identity changes because I'm so desperate to find a niche. I feel like Crystal Pepsi."

  In the middle of all this, Dad was putzing around in the background. He's building my space station I'm designing in real space and real time. He asked me where the box with 8-stud beams was. ("Over there by the bowl of plastic eyeballs." "Oh right - there they are.")

  Bug continued, "I know I'm sort of a nerd and I don't dress nicely and I grouch out at times, but I still want to be me. I want to find somebody else, sure, but I also don't want to end up harder at the end of all of this." He went back to work.

  Ethan sauntered through. "Milestones? Are we meeting our milestones, oh content delivery system of mine?"

  * * *

  Susan, Emmett, Dusty, and about a dozen Chyx organized together over the Net, and decided to picket Fry's for fostering female de-intelligence by not selling tampons. The San Jose Mercury News interviewed them, took their picture, and left soon enough. Victory!

  [Formatter's note: One full page with nothing but consonants, and one full page with nothing but vowels, deleted here]

  SATURDAY

  Michael and Ethan broke down and told everyone the news - we have NO money. They made sure Dad wasn't around for the news, which was nice. We'd more or less suspected this all along, so in the end it came as no surprise.

  Suddenly Microsoft doesn't look so bad. How could we have been so stupid to leave? Microsoft is a business first and only - not a social welfare state for 13,000 people who lucked in at the right moment.

  Michael is petrified we migh
t have to sell his Lego. "It's so pretty - it would be murder . . . a sin . . . to take it all apart. And last week ID magazine came in to take its picture."

  The thing is, we agree about the Lego. It is too pretty to sell. Somewhere a few weeks ago, like a piece of DNA with just the right number of proteins added, it became alive. We can't kill it.

  Suddenly it occurred to me that Ethan could sell his Patek Phillipe watch. That's 35 million yen right there. I said, "Ethan, sell your watch," and he said, "I can't believe you thought this was genuine," and dropped it into the coffee pot saying, "Six dollars. Kowloon. 1991."

  We got nothing done in the afternoon. In fact we got drunk. We have no idea what we're going to do. Work some more, I suppose.

  * * *

  Abe looks like he's all set to go nonlinear. His e-mail is becoming telltale to an amazing degree:

  At 21, you make this Faustian pact with yourself - that your company is allowed to soak up 7 to 10 years of your life - but then at 30 you have to abandon the company, or else there's something WRONG with you.

  The tech system feeds on bright, asocial kids from diveorced backgrounds who had pro-education parents. We ARE in a new industry; there aren't really many older poeple in it. We are on the vanguard of adoldescence protraction.

  As is common with Microsoft people I worked like a mental case throughout my 20s, and then hit this wall at thiry and went *SPLAT*.

  But just think about the way high tech cultures puropose - fully protract out the adolescence of their employees well into their late 20s , if not their early 30s,. I mean, all those NERF TOUYS and FREE BEVERRGES! And the way tech firms won't even call work "The office:, but instead , "the campus".

  It's sick and evil. At least down in California YOU"RE not working on a campus.

  With you’re 30s begins "the closing" . . . you realize that it' not going to be forever. . .the game becomes a lot more serious. People get more involved in their work.

  Conundrum: I can't imagine not giving myself fully to a job . . . 100% of me . . but if I DO, I'd never "have a life" (whatever that means.) The problem is, who'd WANT to have a job that couldn't absorb you 100%??

  SEE?

  * * *

  Back at the office, drunk, Susan demonstrated for us the Official Chyx handshake - all Chyx members greet each other by emulating the world-famous Farrah Fawcett simultaneous hair-flip-and-aim gesture, touching fingertips in mock gun-firing pose at the end of the gesture's completion. Dusty, Karla, Michael, and Susan were in the Lego garden practicing, and it was like boot camp:

  "Make it fluid, kids - remember, you're sweeping twelve pounds of Texan corn-fed hair out of your eyes and readying a loaded Colt .45 almost simultaneously. There's a slight flip of the neck involved, and the left gun-holding hand must reach horizontal position at exactly the same moment the hair-flipping finger has swept the hair and is ready to pull the trigger. Michael - a bit more grace. Dusty, what would Kelly, Jill, and Sabrina say about that jerkiness between the hair and the trigger? Take aim, Chyx. You are the world. Free your mind. Unplug. Plug in."

  * * *

  Thought: all PC-style consumer electronics are the same oyster-gray color of Macintoshes. The guy who makes the gray pigment must be one rich pigment maker. And all TV-style things are black. What will be the color when TVs and PCs merge?

  SUNDAY

  Abe has defected! Susan was on CNN! What a day! Exclamation marks!

  First of all, Abe arrived with a U-Haul filled with 10,000 plastic drinking straws, Jif, a bed, and, hopefully, a Scrooge McDuck-like heap of money. He entered our Hamilton Street office around noon wearing his Starship Enterprise T-shirt. I said to him, "Hi, Abe, welcome home," and he said, "Hello, Daniel. I'm having my trampoline shipped down - even though it would probably be cheaper to buy one here."

  He paused here and looked about the Lego garden. "It would be a shame not to bring the trampster with me, you know - such a useful metaphor for labor in the 1990s." He scanned the room further, seemingly unfazed by its colorful shock value, and pulled a plump-looking Costco bag out from underneath his armpit. "Oh, hello, Michael . . . I brought you some cheese slices to help us through those all-nighters. Now please tell me, just where is my space going to be?"

  Abe had a brief meeting with Michael and Ethan ran out shouting, "We're liquid! We're liquid! We really are the liquid engineers. Daniel . . . how do you spell relief? Spell it, C-A-P-I-T-A-L."

  Indeed, Abe is becoming an equity partner. He's going to help Michael out as a "senior" engineer and finish some core low-level code for him. Not only that but, in the interim until he finds a place to live, Abe is also moving in with Ethan up at the Dirty Harry house, and Ethan's overjoyed at the prospect of cash. Ethan was like that old cartoon dog character who, every time he received a bone, his ears would twirl up like a helicopter, his body would rise into the sky, and then he would float down to the earth in limp abandon.

  Abe said, "People without lives like to hang out with other people who don't have lives. Thus they form lives." Even better, he'll have company.

  * * *

  CNN: We bootlegged a coaxial cable line in from the next office over and had it blasting on the monitor all day, watching "our Susan" every hour on the hour until around six o'clock, demonstrating for 137 countries around the world the Official Chyx handshake, discussing gender-blindness in the tech world, and, best of all, sneaking in her Net address.

  It was very "TV." After 6:00, her segment was replaced by a segment on toilet training your cat.

  Susan never even told us she did a CNN interview. But she came across so well. She's a star! And already her Chyx mailbox on our little Oop! node is jammed with responses. Susan, wearing a T-shirt portraying gender intelligence researcher Brenda Laurel that she had custom-made at Kinko's, was radiantly happy - not just at seeing her equity in Oop! saved at the last minute by Abe's money bin, but in seeing Chyx explode internationally. "Quelle plug for Chyx," she said, obviously thrilled. "And that Chyx handshake looked so good on TV. Best idea I ever had."

  * * *

  We celebrated all of the day's news with sundown drinks at the Empire Tap Room, and people were coming up to Susan and saying, "You're the smart one!" and Susan admitted that she, indeed, identified with Kate Jackson on Charlie's Angels.

  Michael mixed Robitussin with his Calistoga water. We asked him if the drink had a name and he said, "I hereby christen this drink, 'the Justine Bateman' after the lovely and talented sister character, Mallory, of TV's beloved mid-eighties sitcom, Family Ties."

  Abe felt left out and wanted to invent a drink, too, so he put two Redoxon vitamin tablets into his diet Coke and rum and christened it a "Tina Yothers," "the smart, sassy younger sister of the above-mentioned TV sitcom."

  We then tormented the staff by demanding those European layered drinks with all of the various liqueurs of varying specific gravities in tall, thin glasses. Dusty called the drinks "metaphor for the class system," and we were all weirded-out because we remembered she used to be so political and now she just changes the subject whenever it comes up.

  Then, because so many people in the Bay Area have tattoos, we lapsed into a discussion of the subject. In the end, we all basically decided, "Yuck," all except for Bug who is still considering a lifetime of body mutilation with an earring appointment he has next week. Bug was actually being a bit mopey - the breakup, I suppose.

  Anyway, we concluded that if we were forced at gunpoint to have a tattoo put onto us, the only acceptable tattoo we could think of was a bar code symbol.

  We then tried to decide which bar codes would be coolest, and we decided the best ones would be products with high brand-name recognition: Kraft dinner, Kotex, Marlboro, Coca-Cola, and so forth.

  And then we figured that bar codes will be obsolete soon enough, and having one on your shoulder or forehead would be like having a Betamax tattooed on your shoulder or forehead.

  So in the end we couldn't decide on a tattoo.

  * * *

/>   There was this weird moment at the end of the night when everybody was pixelated. Ethan was carrying two flaming Sambucas, and tripped over a Planet of the Apes lunchbox somebody left on the floor next to a backpack, and the drinks sloshed all over the back of Susan's T-shirt, and she was on fire, like the "Flame On!" guy from the Fantastic Four.

  Emmett leapt over to her from behind and smothered her flames with his body and Susan, who was so drunk she didn't even know about the Sambuca, said, "I forgive you, my love," and Emmett kissed her on the neck and then he whispered to Karla and me, "She's on fire and she doesn't even know it. Poor baby."

  * * *

  After the Tap Room, we were all far too drunk to drive - even the intake-conscious pregnant Dusty - so we wobbled back to the office (piss tanks, all of us) and we turned the lights down low, so that only the dimmer lights were glowing on our Lego garden, as though it were sunset. We were all just lolling about on the floor, feeling childish because we weren't coding for another few hours. Dusty and Karla were making hair accessories out of Lego bricks ("Ooh, it's a Topsy Tail!") and Ethan, Emmett, and Michael were having a half-hearted (make that quarter-hearted) game of Nerf Wars across the Lego garden. Todd was lying on his stomach staring at Dusty's stomach (no visible baby yet) and Bug was taking apart and rebuilding a small house my father had built, and seemed lost in some other world.

  Susan was building a striped, Dr. Seuss-like radio tower, and asked Bug what was on his mind, and Bug said, "1978."

  Susan said, "Not the best year for music."

  Bug said, "That was the year I fell in love. The year I got my heart broken."

  Drunk or not, all ears, visibly or surreptitiously, turned to Bug.

  "I wasn't supposed to fall in love. I didn't even know it was love. I didn't even know that love was some sort of option. All I knew was that I couldn't take my eyes off him. I wasn't even looking around, but somehow this guy drew my attention magnetically, and I was bewitched."