Microserfs

It was another rainy night that called for a fire. We’d most of us spent the day processing all of our new career option data.

We ran out of fire logs and had to light a real fire with flammables culled from around the house: a Brawny paper towel carton full of junk mail and bits of furniture too ugly to even throw out. And then Bug found a packaged fire log in the garage with (he read from the wrapping), “’Realistic- looking flames and colors’—you can put anything on a label and people will believe it. We are one sick species, I tell you.”

The fire was huge and felt religious, and triggered among all of us a discussion of our youthful pyromaniac tendencies. Our conversation became an unexpected bonding experience for us. We talked about pipe bombs, M-80s, Lysol spray can flame-throwers, sodium chunks borrowed from chem labs, potassium nitrate melted together with sugar into smoke bombs, firecracker bricks, MJB cans filled with gasoline into which lit matchbooks are tossed, and methane bubbled through water mixed with Joy dishwashing liquid (“fiery bubbles of doom”).

Question: Is there an alt.pyro on the Net? Probably. There’s something there for everybody.

Susan was able to dig up area code data from, of all places, Trieste, Italy — on the Net. It turns out that North America is creating up to 640 new area codes by allowing digits other than zero or one to go in the middle. So there can be area codes like 647 and 329. With roughly eight million phone lines possible per code, “That makes for roughly 5.1 billion new portals to fun.”

Karla was relieved that we don’t have to have eight-digit phone numbers, “at least until some new, as yet uninvented technology, eats up the old ones again.”

Then we digressed into a discussion of how the word “dialing” is itself such an anachronism — a holdover from rotary phones. “Inputting” would be more true. And who came up with the word “pound” for the “#” symbol. Wouldn’t “grid” have been easier and more fun? I mean, “pound”

Or think of how dumb it is to say, “I’m going to the record store.”

Technology!

* * *

You may

have already won!

Technology of mythic strength given surrealistic applications.

Socially disengaged meritocratic elites.

Sporting goods stores always smell like the most

advanced plastics.

Did the neutron bomb ever actually get built?

SUNDAY

Bug is going to accept Michael’s offer. This is out of character, given that Bug worships Bill and the corporate culture of Microsoft so much. But he seems quite jolly and decisive about the move. I think the fact he was slated for transfer to the Converter Group in Building Seventeen, a notoriously glum Campus locale, added some oomph to his decision. Bug is a good debugger. That’s how he got his name, so Michael’s probably getting a good deal in hiring him. I still can’t figure out why he never got stock options.

Todd, too, has decided to go, perhaps also propelled by his transfer into the OLE Group (Ole!), over in the Old Buildings.

This is the Object Linking and Embedding Group that writes code for an application allowing a user to drag part of, say, an Excel document into a Word document. About as much fun as it sounds.

Susan’s accepting — and she’s forking up some of her vesting money as seed capital for a larger equity stake — and she’s clinching the title of Creative Director. “I’ll be the Paul Allen of interactivit

Abe, however, is saying no. “What — you guys want to leave a sure thing?” he keeps asking us. “You think Microsoft’s going to shrink, or are you nuts?”

“That’s not the point, Abe.”

“What is the point, then?”

“One-Point-Oh,” I said.

“What?” replied Abe.

“Being One-Point-Oh. The first to do something cool or new.”

“And so in order to be ‘One-Point-Oh’ you’d forfeit all of this—” (Abe fumbles for le mot juste, and expands arms widely to showcase a filthy living room covered with Domino’s boxes, junk mail solicitations, Apple hard hats, three Federal Express baseball caps, and Nerf Gatling guns) “— security? How do you know you’re not just trading places … coding like fuck every day except with a palm tree outside the window instead of a cedar?”

Karla reiterated what she said to Todd, about humanity’s dreaming, but Abe is too scared, I think, to make the leap. He’s too set in his ways. Repetition breeds inertia.

My computer’s subconscious files continue still to surprise me. Who would have known that these are the words my machine wanted to speak? Well, actually, I know that it’s me speaking through the computer, sort of like those really quiet guys who go all nuts when you give them a wooden puppet — ventriloquists — and these aspects of their personalities you didn’t even know existed start screaming out.

MONDAY

Abe has actually provoked Karla and me into deciding, *yes*. We both gave Shaw our two weeks’ notices, and basically he said we might as well leave at the end of the week since we’re not currently “with project.”

With start-ups: you get a crap shoot at mega-equity but more importantly, it’s true, you do get a chance to be “One-Point-Oh.” To be the first to do the first version of something.

We had to ask ourselves, “Are you One-Point-Oh?”—the answer is what separates the Microserfs from the Cyberlords.

But beyond this there’s what Karla said — about being human, and the dream of humanity. I get this little feeling that we can all of us speed up th dream, dream in color, dream in volume, and dream together down south. We can, and will, fabricate the waking dream.

THURSDAY Later that week

Preparing for this weekend’s yard sale, I found a half-pound lump of hamburger meat in the garage that had been sitting in a Miracle Whip jar for about four months — an experiment I had forgotten about. The meat was still kind of pink, with gray fuzz growing on it. “A test to see if the beef industry pumps up cattle with preservatives,” I told Karla.

She looked at the jar. “Your brain,” she said dismissively, “during the last half-year here at Microsoft.”

Mom phoned. She sounds so much better now that the economic stress is off her and that she’s exercising. After a short while I got to asking what it i that Dad does for Michael exactly—“So what’s