put aside her usual lack of enthusiasm for his model trains, and talked to Dad about them, like it was show-and-tell time.
“The model train setup has expanded since you were here last, Danny,” she told me. “There’s a complete small town now, and the mountains are steeper and he’s put more of those little green foam trees on them. It’s like Perfectville, the town where everybody’s supposed to grow up. There’s a church now — and a supermarket and boxcars — he even has little drifters living inside the boxcars. And there’s—”
There was a pause.
“And what, Mom?”
Still more silence.
“And — oh, Danny—” This was not easy for her to say.
I said, “And what, Mom?”
“Danny, there is a small white house on the top of the hill overlooking the town — apart from the rest of the landscape. So amongst my other questions I asked him, ‘Oh, and what’s that house there?’ and he said to me, without breaking his pace, ‘That’s where Jed lives.”’
We were both quiet. Mom sighed.
“How about I come down to Palo Alto tomorrow?” I said. “There’s nothing pressing here. Lord knows I have enough time owing to me.”
More silence. “Could you, honey?”
I said, “Yes.”
“I think that would be good.”
I could hear their fridge humming down in California.
“There’s so many consultants on the market right now,” Mom said. “People always say that if you get downsized you can become a consultant, but your father is 53, Dan. He’s not young and he’s never been competitive by nature. I mean, he was at IBM. We really just don’t know what is going to happen.”
I called a travel agent in Bellevue and VISA’d a ticket to San Jose. I skipped e-mail and tried to focus on the overnight stress tests, but my mind was blanking. Two code breaks overnight — so close to shipping and we’re still getting breaks!
I tried roaming the corridors for diversion, but somehow the world was different. Michael was in Cupertino (with my luggage); Abe wasn’t in his office — he’d bailed out for the day and gone sailing in Puget Sound with some Richie Rich friends; Bug had gone into a crazy mood since breakfast and had a “Get Lost” Post-it note on his door; and Susan was at home for the day preparing for the Vest Fest. And the one other person I wanted to see, Karla, wasn’t in her office.
I was leaning over the rails of the central atrium, looking at the art displays in the cases and the spent nerds flopped out on the couches below, when Shaw walked by. I had to be all hearty and rah-rah and perky about the shipping deadline.
Shaw said that Karla was away with Kent doing a marketing something-or-other, and the thought flashed through my head that I wanted to kill Kent, which was irrational and not like me.
The day then degenerated into a “Thousand Dollar Day.” That’s what I call the kind of day where, even if you tell all the people you know, “I’ll give you a crisp, new thousand-dollar bill if you just give me a phone call and put me out of my misery,” even still, nobody phones.
I only received eighteen pieces of e-mail, and most of them were bulk. And the WinQuote only went up and down by pennies. Nobody got rich; nobody got poor.
The rain broke around 3:00 and I walked around the Campus feeling miserable. I looked at all the cars parked in the lot and got exhausted just thinking about all the energy that must have gone into these people choosing
All these little fears: fear of not producing enough; fear of not finding a little white-with-red-printing stock option envelope in the pigeonhole; fear of losing the sensation of actually making something anymore; fear about the slow erosion of perks within the company; fear that the growth years will never return again; fear that the bottom line is the only thing that really drives the process; fear of disposability … God, listen to me. What a downer. But sometimes I think it would be so much easier to be jerking espressos in Lynwood, leaving the Tupperware- sealed, Biosphere 2-like atmosphere of Microsoft behind me.
And this got me thinking. I looked around and noticed that if you took all of the living things on the Microsoft Campus, separated them into piles, and analyzed the biomass, it would come out to:
• 38% Kentucky bluegrass
• 19% human beings
• 003% Bill
• 8% Douglas and balsam fir
• 7% Western red cedar
• 5% hemlock
• 23% other: crows, birch, insects, worms, microbes, nerd aquarium fish, decorator plants in the lobbies …
Went home early at 5:30 and nobody was there. Susan had two card tables unfolded in the otherwise empty dining room area, awaiting their snacks. Abe had loaned Susan his sacred Dolby THX sound system for the party plus his two Adirondack chairs made from old skis. The place still looked a bit bare.
It was like The Day Without People.
Around dark, things started hopping. Abe returned from sailing and cranked up old Human League tunes, to which he sang along from the shower. Susan returned with bags of food from the caterers that I helped her carry in and set up: pasta puttanesca, Thai noodles, calzones, Chee-tos, and gherkins. Bug and some of his bitter, nutcase friends arrived with a wide selection of beer, and they were in good moods, sitting around playing peanut gallery to
By 8:00, other guests began arriving, bringing bottles of wine, and by 9:00, the house, which not two hours previously had been a pit of gloom, was brimming with good cheer and U2.
Around 9:30, Susan was talking with her friends, telling them that she’d vested just in the nick of time—“I’ve been switching from a right-lobe person to a left-lobe person over the past 18 months, and I couldn’t have gone on coding much longer. Anyway, I think the era of vesting is coming to a close.” The phone in my room rang just then. (We have nine lines into our house. Pacific Bell either loves us or hates us.) I excused myself to answer it. It was Mom.
Apparently Dad had just flown up to Seattle from Palo Alto on impulse. She’d just gotten in from her library job and had found the note on the door. I asked what time his flight landed and she told me he was arriving at the airport as we spoke.
So I went and sat on the curb outside the house. It was a bit chilly and I was wearing my old basketball varsity coat. Karla walked up the hill from her place, said hello, and sat down beside me, carrying a twelve-pack of beer that seemed enormously large for her small arms. From my body language she knew that everything wasn’t okay, and she didn’t ask me anything. I simply said, “My Dad’s just flown up here — he’s come unglued. I think he’ll be arriving shortly.” We sat and looked at the treetops and heard the wind rustle.
“I heard you were in a marketing discussion all day with Kent,” I said to her.
“Yeah. It was unproductive. Pretty numbing. He’s a creep.”
“You know, I’ve been going through the whole day wanting to bludgeon him.”
“Really?” She said. She looked at me sideways.
“Yeah. Really.”
“Well now, that’s not too logical, is it?”
“No.”
She then held my hand, and we sat there, together. We drank some of the beer she had brought and we said hello to Mishka the Dog, who cruised by to visit then went for a nap under the trampoline. And we watched the cars that pulled up to the house, one by one, waiting for the one car that would contain my father.
He arrived not too long afterward, in a rental car, piss drunk (not sure how he swung
