JPod

by Douglas Coupland

  We heard a cat yowl from behind our cubicle wall: Kaitlin. "You people are driving me absolutely fucking crazy. All you ever talk about is junk."

  I looked over at her—brown hairs Van de Graaffing from her forehead; a pimple she'd been hoping nobody would notice caked in skin product; small, perfect teeth. I was wondering what her kiss would taste like, when she picked up a Clive Cussler novel that everyone in the pod had read, and hucked it at the wall by the air intake.

  Bree encouraged her. 'You throw that book, Kaitlin! Get it all out!"

  She gave another snared-in-the-leg-hold cry, then hurled an N64 development folder from 1998, followed by a hardcover copy of If They Only Knew, the 1999 autobiography of World Wrestling Federation sensation Chyna.

  After this, she seemed as spent as Mr. Burns handing a shovel to Smithers after throwing a handful of dirt onto a grave, and she spoke in the one-word sentences used by exhausted slaves: "All. I. Want. To. Do. Tonight. Is. Design. A. Realistic. Looking. Waterfall. Ripple. Texture. Is. That. Too. Fucking. Much. To. Ask?"

  "I think we should all get back to work," I said.

  a pair of oversize

  green foam latex

  Incredible

  Hulk

  boxing

  gloves

  with built-in

  Hulk

  noises

  All new company

  passwords must contain

  at least one character,

  integer and symbol:

  This fridge belongs to the company.

  Anyone using this fridge automatically agrees to obey all rules for fridge usage dictated by the company.

  "Usage" is legally defined as "the moment somebody opens the door up until the moment the door is once again shut."

  lens

  urethra

  womb

  tail

  eardrum

  mustard

  bun

  //

  Texture diffuse:

  DiffuseMap

  Float amount = 3.0i

  LightMap

  [... nx, ny, nz,x, y, z, r, g, b . . . ]

  . . .

  I was about to get to work when I decided that I needed, nay, deserved a nap after the previous freaky day, so I crawled under my desk, with a Yellow Pages as a pillow, and conked out for an hour or so. I woke up with my neck feeling cricked and spina bifida-ish. I grabbed an orange juice and went back to my desk. Ahhhhhhh . . . I have to say, smuggling-wear is actually quite comfy—soft, with no hems or waistbands to dig into the skin.

  I began fielding Chute-mail from various levels of producers, and was feeling calm and good, when Gord-O, a senior development director, came rumbling towards jPod. "Ethan, word upstairs is that you're thinking of switching to the production career path."

  "It's true."

  "Very well, here's the Costco card. I'm going to need you to pick up some DVD-Rs for weekend builds. The Physics SEs want to look at THUG2, so pick up the Xbox version of that. And we're out of Cheerios. Pick us up a couple dozen boxes in a ratio of three boxes of Honey Nut to one box of classic Cheerios."

  Such is the life of a young techie dreaming of being a genuine future production assistant: one moment you're trying to round up a selection of C++ fantasy casdes to appease an angry fartcatc her in Development, the next you're stuck in traffic with enough Cheerios on the back seat to make the car ratde like maracas going over a speed bump.

  En route to Costco, I was phoned by John Doe for details on an upcoming Tetris tournament, but we got sidetracked and ended up discussing work. The big discussion around the office is how to alter BoardX's development cycle to accommodate Jeff the Turtle. "John, this is no Japanese curry-induced bad dream. It's really happening."

  "Stop saying that, Ethan!"

  Bree then called. "Ethan, did you hear about Adam?"

  "No, what?" Adam is senior animator from the company's jock set.

  "He got really drunk last night and then went on the treadmill. His anti-chafing nipple tape came off, he freaked, and he ended up whacking his head on a stainless steel bowl filled with botdes of mineral water," Bree said.

  "Ow."

  "Ten stitches. On the way to the hospital, he started screaming in Jeb's Saab, so Jeb reached into the glove box and got out a can of Solarcaine and started spraying it on Adam's face—which prompdy caught on fire from a spark from Jeb's cellphone battery charger. Not a trace of eyebrow left."

  "Wow."

  "Everybody in his pod is shaving off their eyebrows in sympathy."

  Tetris Challenge

  Tonight, 7:00

  Merlots

  vs.

  Zinfandels

  s

  z

  T

  L

  J

  Q

  bar

  square

  . . .

  My prank Belgian keyboard is in the belly of an Airbus 320 somewhere over the North Polar ice cap, huddled in its little box, wondering if its new owner will love it or not. I've only ever flown across an ocean once, to London with the school band. The entire experience was wasted on me. Mosdy I remember that never-ending in-flight information screen that tells passengers how far they've come, and how many miles remain. It's so sloooowwwwwwwwww. Stare at it intendy enough and time goes backwards. And do we really need to know that the outside temperature is —59 degrees Fahrenheit? Does this information comfort us with the knowledge that should we crash and somehow survive, death by exposure will be swift and merciful? Also, Celsius conversion seems unnecessary, as around —59, electrons probably crawl to a stop, like Ping-Pong balls on a basement floor. Okay, I know it's 222.6 degrees Kelvin, -50.56 degrees Celsius.

  . . .

  My phone rang. "Hello, dear."

  "Mom. Hi."

  "Did you get your girlfriend home okay?"

  "Yes. Yeah. Fine."

  "She hacked off such a huge chunk of The Dude. It's good to know you've dropped her. You have dropped her, haven't you?"

  "Uh, yeah."

  "You hesitated there for a second. I heard it."

  "I was closing windows on my screen."

  ' Young Steven took me on a tour of the entire facility, you know."

  "Steven} We call him Steve here."

  "Lovely man. He turned Toblerone around in just two years."

  "Yes, he did do that."

  Silence.

  "Ethan, I need your help."

  A loaded pause. "Again?"

  "My spreadsheets."

  Relief. "Okay. Sure."

  "Are you free later this afternoon?"

  The moment Mom asked if I was free, Gord-O walked into my cubicle and pointed his index finger at me, meaning, Come talk to me, right now rather than later. "I can find the time."

  "Make sure that time is four o'clock. Please, honey?"

  "Well. . ."

  "I'll make your favourite dessert."

  She hung up.

  Gord-O asked, "What's with the ragamuffin fashion look?"

  "Gord-O. Hi. How can I help you?"

  "You get a lot of personal phone calls, Ethan."

  "In three years, I've had six personal phone calls, and somehow you're always right there when they happen. Are you stalking me?"

  Gord-O ignored me. "The level builders just got a call, and the exec group is on their ass saying they need a better castle model."

  "I found maybe four dozen pre-modelled casdes, ranging from a molecule-perfect rebuilding of Mad King Ludwig's Bavarian hideaway to a do-it-yourself plywood backyard kit. What do they want?"

  Gord-O repeated himself. "The level builders just got a call, and the exec group is on their ass saying they need a better casde model."

  "Gotcha. I'll look again." I actually don't mind scouring the Internet, finding stuff. In my brain it doesn't feel like work.

  "And, Ethan, next time remember the ratio of Honey Nut to classic Cheerios is three to one."

  "They were out of Honey Nut."

  "To be
merely good enough is to never succeed." With a platitude as his last word, Gord-O left.

  I heard Kaitlin's disembodied voice from over the cubicle wall. "Ethan, what exactly is your job description?"

  She speaks.

  "One minute you're supposed to be optimizing code, the next you're bulk shopping for Cheerios. Doesn't this place have free cereal already?"

  "Last year Gord-O's team ate too many Cheerios, so Accounting got on their case, and they still ate too many, so then Legal had to draw up a brief outlining the company's free Cheerios policy. Since then, they've had to buy their own."

  "And you have to get them?"

  "I look upon my job as apprenticeship rather than servitude."

  "If you ask me, you're living in Schmucksville."

  "Schmucksville?"

  "It's a retro reference to 1960s Catskill comedy routines."

  "Huh." I tried to think of something witty to say.

  Kaitlin asked, "So what is the real deal with your ragamuffin look?"

  "It's"—how to explain?—"hard to explain."

  "You look like Elizabeth Smart's kidnappers."

  Her phone rang and I went off in search of more 3-D clip art cas-des. By three-thirty I was able to squeak out of the building on the pretext of buying Honey Nut Cheerios. Mom was in the kitchen, drinking tea and reading the Province. "Hello, dear. You're wearing... rags."

  "It's the new look."

  We went into Dad's den, where Mom had a G4 all set to go. The spreadsheet problem seemed easy to fix. "I think you just have some fields crossed. Which part is giving you the biggest problem?"

  "I'm trying to track THC counts, along with the genetic ancestry of the plants."

  "I see what it is—genetics are logarithmic, whereas potency counts aren't."

  "I'm glad someone here understands it. I'll go get you a nice big piece of double-frosted chocolate devil's food cake."

  "I thought you were kidding about that."

  "Nothing's too good for my baby boy."

  Mom has a pretty good system for tracking the genetic histories of her crops. It involves an alphabetizing scheme wherein each female plant is assigned one upper case letter, which is followed by an upper or lower case letter, depending on whether the plant was a clone or a genetic male/female cross. Td, her favourite, was The Dude, a mutant THC miracle of genetics, and, to be honest, it bugged me, too, that Ellen had given him a pruning.

  Mom's plant names reflect her somewhat random TV watching habits. Surrounding The Dude were:

  . . .

  Gord-O saw me walking into jPod.

  "Where were you?"

  "I was out looking for Honey Nut Cheerios, but Save-On was sold out, too. The guy there said that Martha Stewart used them in a program about homemade energy bars, and they've been out for a week."

  "Oh."

  Am I good, or what!

  Everyone in jPod was beavering away, and my entrance generated no enthusiasm.

  The phone rang, as I suspected it would: Dad. "My Ellen problem is solved. I gave a producer I know twenty-five grand in cash from my Hummer fund, and he's sending Ellen to Toronto tomorrow for ten weeks to work on a Hallmark Channel movie."

  "That was fast. Hallmark has a channel? The greeting card company?"

  "Whoops. I meant Heardand—the chick flick channel."

  "Dad, if you want a speaking part in a movie so badly, why don't you find a producer and give him or her some Hummer money, too?"

  "That would be cheating. I have to earn that speaking role. And by the way, your mother says you're wearing rags."

  . . .

  Okay, I know I have to address the ragamuffin issue.

  Here's the deal: when it comes to duds, I'm really sick of everybody trying to be different from everybody else. In the end, everybody's simply buying their outfits from the same selection of stores at the same mall. I'm also not stupid enough to think that wearing random thrift-store clothing makes me a rebel or an outsider. Gee, is that a 1997 Chilcotin Rodeo T-shirt you've got on? Wow! Out of 5.5 billion people on the planet, you differentiate yourself from the rest!

  So, when all those smuggled Chinese people had to abandon their clothes at my place, it was like my fashion gift of the gods. Indeed, the gods had handed me a look on a platter. And the thing is, once you establish a look, and once everybody recognizes that look zs your look, you never have to think about fashion again. It's pig laziness on my part, but so what.

  . . .

  The rest of the evening was quiet.

  Turtles.

  Jeff.

  Deadline.

  Efficiency.

  Lots of efficiency.

  Too much efficiency.

  A sense of unease . . . a wave of paranoia.

  A slight gust of chilled wind.

  Cowboy said, "Do you feel something weird?"

  Cap'n Crunch granules of sleep fell from the corners of my eyes into my keyboard, into the seven-key cluster of

  ui

  HJK

  NM

  I said, "No."

  Cowboy said, "I feel chilled or something."

  Kaitlin, surprising us all from behind her cubicle wall, snorted and said (without standing up), 'You feel chilled because you have no character. You're a depressing assemblage of pop culture influences and cancelled emotions, driven by the sputtering engine of only the most banal form of capitalism. You spend your life feeling as if you're perpetually on the brink of being obsolete—whether it's labour market obsolescence or cultural unhipness. And it's all catching up with you. You live and die by the development cycle. You're glamorized drosophila flies, with the company regulating your life cycles at whim. If it isn't a budget-driven eighteen-month game production schedule, it's a five-year hardware obsolescence schedule. Every five years you have to throw away everything you know and learn a whole new set of hardware and software specs, relegating what was once critical to our lives to the cosmic slag heap."

  Cowboy considered this. "So, then, what's wrong with that?"

  "What's wrong with that is that you might just as well be tyrannized cotton-mill workers in rural Massachusetts in the nineteenth century. You might as well be stitching Nikes together in some quasi-corrupt archipelago nation in Asia in return for badly ventilated dorm rooms and $1.95 a day."

  Silence.

  Loaded silence.

  Cowboy said, "Do you have to be so political about it?"

  Kaitlin heaved a generic world-weary sigh. "Cowboy, let's look at you—tell us what your character is."

  Cowboy fumbled. "Well—"

  "I'm listening."

  "I think I'm an okay-enough guy."

  "Gee. That's fascinating."

  "Let me think."

  "Take all the time you want."

  After thirty pregnant seconds, Cowboy said, "This is stupid. Why should I have to sit here and define who I am?"

  "There you have it, Cowboy."

  "Have what}"

  "What you have is the fact that if you don't have a character to begin with, everything and nothing is in character."

  "That's really fucking depressing."

  "And what if it is?"

  "It's like Melrose Place."

  "Melrose?" said Bree. "That was a hundred years ago."

  John Doe got excited. "I watched the whole series on DVD. Remember when the script writers couldn't come up with personalities or characteristics for the characters? They simply made them all go psycho, one by one."

  Bree nodded. "It worked, didn't it?"

  Evil Mark added, "I liked that show."

  I said, "I never watched it. It felt target-marketed."

  "Aaron Spelling made so much money with it," said Kaitlin. "But didn't you notice that, when they started, they were all twenty some-thing slackers looking for meaning in life, living in a motel-like complex with a swimming pool in the centre?"

  Bree said, "That's exactly like the characters in Douglas Coupland's 1991 novel, Generation X."

  "Ex
acdy."

  "So they ripped Coupland off?"

  "That's harsh and actionable. But who are we to say?"

  "Sounds fishy to me."

  "If I were Douglas Coupland, I'd have sued the pants off Aaron Spelling."

  "Me, too."

  "So would I."

  Finally something we all agreed on.

  Lovely pod

  jPod is a happy place!

  You can be happy, also, in the jPod space. Be happy. Be jPod.

  Let's Working!

  Please sample a large variety of our serene office environment joyful things. They want to be your friend! They want your good times, too.

  jPodding work style is a way to make friends and enjoy the happy life.

  Zaxxon

  Manufacturer: Sega/Gremlin

  Year: 1982

  Class: Wide Release

  Genre: Space

  Type: Videogame

  Conversion Class: Sega Zaxxon

  Number of Simultaneous Players: 1

  Maximum Number of Players: 2

  Gameplay: Alternating

  Control Panel Layout: Single Player Ambidextrous

  Sound: Amplified Mono (One Channel)

  . . .

  Kaitlin's dissection of Cowboy's personality made me begin to have doubts about my own personality. Prior to Kaitlin's rant, I thought Cowboy was the quirkiest person I knew. And now he was suddenly just a Lego mini-fig. (Okay, maybe John Doe is the quirkiest person I know.)

  But honestly—do I have a personality? Do any of us? I scoured my life and saw no overriding purpose, just my love affair with computer games—my old SOL and the 8808s in particular. If nothing else, I was pleased to be able to earn a living within an industry that's increasingly more corporate and bland and soul-killing, but. . . but then I got to wondering if I even possessed the ability to fall in love with another human being and . . . I began to feel like such a module, especially compared to Kaitlin, who was such a firebrand tonight. I couldn't help but wonder what she's like when she removes all of her brakes.