Microserfs

We call ourselves “The Channel Three News Team.”

I am single. I think partly this is because Microsoft is not conducive to relationships. Last year down at the Apple Worldwide Developer’s Conference in San Jose, I met a girl who works not too far away, at Hewlett-Packard on Interstate 90, but it never went anywhere. Sometimes I’ll sort of get something going, but then work takes over my life and I bail out of all my commitments and things fizzle.

Lately I’ve been unable to sleep. That’s why I’ve begun writing this journal late at night, to try to see the patterns in my life. From this I hope to establish what my problem is — and then, hopefully, solve it. I’m trying to feel more well adjusted than I really am, which is, I guess, the human condition. My life is lived day to day, one line of bug-free code at a time.

The house:

Growing up, I used to build split-level ranch-type homes out of Legos. This is pretty much the house I live in now, but its ambiance is anything but sterilized Lego-clean. It was built about twenty years ago, maybe before Microsoft was even in the dream stage and this part of Redmond had a lost, alpine ski-cabin feel.

Instead of a green plastic pad with little plastic nubblies, our house sits on a thickly-treed lot beside a park on a cul-de-sac at the top of a steep hill. It’s only a seven-minute drive from Campus. There are two other Microsoft group houses just down the hill. Karla, actually, lives in the house three down from us across the street.

People end up living in group houses either by e-mail or by word of mouth. Living in a group house is a little bit like admitting you’re deficient in the having-a-life department, but at work you spend your entire life crunching code and testing for bugs, and what else are you supposed to do? Work, sleep, work, sleep, work, sleep. I know a few Microsoft employees who try to fake having a life — many a Redmond garage contains a never-used kayak collecting dust. You ask these people what they do in their spare time and they say, “Uhhh—kayaking. That’s right. I kayak in my spare time.” You can tell they’re faking it.

I don’t even do many sports anymore and my relationship with my body has gone all weird. I used to play soccer three times a week and now I feel like a boss in charge of an underachiever. I feel like my body is a station wagon in which I drive my brain around, like a suburban mother taking the kids to hockey practice.

The house is covered with dark cedar paneling. Out front there’s a tiny patch of lawn covered in miniature yellow crop circles thanks to the dietary excesses of our neighbor’s German shepherd, Mishka. Bug Barbecue keeps his weather experiments — funnels and litmus strips and so forth — nailed to the wall beside the front door. A flat of purple petunias long-expired from neglect — Susan’s one attempt at prettification — depresses us every time we leave for work in the morning, resting as it does in the thin strip of soil between the driveway and Mishka’s crop circles.

Abe, our in-house multimillionaire, used to have tinfoil all over his bedroom windows to keep out what few rays of sun penetrated the trees until we ragged on him so hard that he went out and bought a sheaf of black construction paper at the Pay N Pak and taped it up instead. It looked like a drifter lived here. Todd’s only contribution to the house’s outer appearance is a collection of car-washing toys sometimes visible beside the garage door. The only evidence of my being in the house is my 1977 AMC Hornet Sportabout hatchback parked out front when I’m home. It’s bright orange, it’s rusty, and damnit, it’s ugly.

SATURDAY

Shipping hell continued again today. Grind, grind, grind. We’ll never make it. Have I said that already? Why do we always underestimate our shipping schedules? I just don’t understand. In at 9:30 A.M.; out at 11:30 P.M. Domino’s for dinner. And three diet Cokes.

I got bored a few times today and checked the WinQuote on my screen — that’s the extension that gives continuous updates on Microsoft’s NASDAQ price. It was Saturday, and there was never any change, but I kept forgetting. Habit. Maybe the Tokyo or Hong Kong exchanges might cause a fluctuation?

Most staffers peek at WinQuote a few times a day. I mean, if you have 10,000 shares (and tons of staff members have way more) and the stock goes up a buck, you’ve just made ten grand! But then, if it goes down two dollars, you’ve just lost twenty grand. It’s a real psychic yo-yo. Last April Fool’s Day, someone fluctuated the price up and down by fifty dollars and half the staff had coronaries.

Because I started out low on the food chain and worked my way up, I didn’t get much stock offered to me the way that programmers and systems designers get stock firehosed onto them when they start. What stock I do own won’t fully vest for another 2.5 years (stock takes 4.5 years to fully vest).

Susan’s stock vests later this week, and she’s going to have a vesting party. And then she’s going to quit. Larger social forces are at work, threatening to dissolve our group house.

The stock closed up $1.75 on Friday. Bill has 78,000,000 shares, so that means he’s now $136.5 million richer. I have almost no stock, and this means I am a loser.

News update: Michael is now out of his office. It’s as if he never had his geek episode. He slept there throughout the whole day (not unusual at Microsoft), using his Jurassic Park inflatable T-Rex toy as a pillow. When he woke up in the early evening, he thanked me for bringing him the Kraft products, and now he says he won’t eat anything that’s not entirely two-dimensional. “Ich bin ein Flatlander,” he piped, as he cheerfully sifted through hard copy of the bug-checked code he’d been chugging out. Karla made disgusted clicking noises with her tongue from her office. I think maybe she’s in love with Michael.

More details about our group house — Our House of Wayward Mobility.

Because the house receives almost no sun, moss and algae tend to colonize what surfaces they can. There is a cherry tree crippled by a fungus. The rear verandah, built of untreated 2?4’s, has quietly rotted away, and the sliding door in the kitchen has been braced shut with a hockey stick to prevent the unwary from straying into the suburban abyss.

The driveway contains six cars: Todd’s cherry-red Supra (his life, what little there is of it), my pumpkin Hornet, and four personality-free gray Microsoftmobiles — a Lexus, an Acura Legend, and two Tauri (nerd plural for Taurus). I bet if Bill drove a Shriner’s go-cart to work, everybody else would, too.

Inside, each of us has a bedroom. Because of the McDonald’s-like turnover in the house, the public rooms — the living room, kitchen, dining room, and basement — are bleak, to say the least. The dormlike atmosphere precludes heavy-duty interior design ideas. In the living room are two velveteen sofas that were too big and too ugly for some long-gone tenants to take with them. Littered about the Tiki green shag carpet are:

• Two Microsoft Works PC inflatable beach cushions

• One Mitsubishi 27-inch color TV

• Various vitamin bottles

• Several weight-gaining system cartons (mine)

• 86 copies of MacWEEK arranged in chronological order by Bug Barbecue, who will go berserk if you so much as move one issue out of date

• Six Microsoft Project 2.0 juggling bean bags

• Bone-shaped chew toys for when Mishka visits

• Two PowerBooks

• Three IKEA mugs encrusted with last month’s blender drink sensation

• Two 12.5-pound dumbbells (Susan’s)

• A Windows NT box

• Three baseball caps (two Mariners, one A’s)

• Abe’s Battlestar Galactica trading card album

• Todd’s pile of books on how to change your life to win! (Getting Past OK, 7 Habits of Highly Effective People …)

The kitchen is stocked with ramshackle 1970s avocado green appliances. You can almost hear the ghost of Emily Hartley yelling “Hi, Bob!” every time you open the fridge door (a sea of magnets and 4-x-6-inch photos of last year’s house parties).

Our mail is in little piles by the front door: bills, Star Trek junk mail, and the heap-o-catalogues next to the phone.