Microserfs

I think we’d order our lives via 1-800 numbers if we could.

Mom phoned from Palo Alto. This is the time of year she calls a lot. She calls because she wants to speak about Jed, but none of us in the family are able. We kind of erased him.

I used to have a younger brother named Jed. He drowned in a boating accident in the Strait of Juan de Fuca when I was 14 and he was 12. A Labor Day statistic.

To this day, anything Labor Day-ish creeps me out: the smell of barbecuing salmon, life preservers, Interstate traffic reports from the local radio Traffic Copter, Monday holidays. But here’s a secret: My e-mail password is hellojed. So I think about him every day. He was way better with computers than I was. He was way nerdier than me.

As it turned out, Mom had good news today. Dad has a big meeting Monday with his company. Mom and Dad figure it’s a promotion because Dad’s IBM division has been doing so well (by IBM standards — it’s not hemorrhaging money). She says she’ll keep me posted.

Susan taped laser-printed notes on all of our bedroom doors reminding us about the vesting party this Thursday (“Vest Fest ‘93”), which was a subliminal hint to us to clean up the place. Most of us work in Building Seven; shipping hell has brought a severe breakdown in cleanup codes.

Susan is 26 and works in Mac Applications. If Susan were a Jeopardy! contestant, her dream board would be:

• 680?0 assembly language

• Cats

• Early ‘80s haircut bands

• “My secret affair with Rob in the Excel Group”

• License plate slogans of America

• Plot lines from The Monkees

• The death of IBM

Susan’s an IBM brat and hates that company with a passion. She credits it with ruining her youth by transferring her family eight times before she graduated from high school — and the punchline is that the company gave her father the boot last year during a wave of restructuring. So nothing too evil can happen to IBM in her eyes. Her graphic designer friend made up T-shirts saying “IBM: Weak as a Kitten, Dumb as a Sack of Hammers.” We all wear them. I gave one to Dad last Christmas but his reaction didn’t score too high on the chuckle-o-meter. (I am not an IBM brat — Dad was teaching at Western Washington University until the siren of industry lured him to Palo Alto in 1985. It was very ‘80s.)

Susan’s a real coding machine. But her abilities are totally wasted reworking old code for something like the Norwegian Macintosh version of Word 5.8. Susan’s work ethic best sums up the ethic of most of the people I’ve met who work at Microsoft. If I recall her philosophy from the conversation she had with her younger sister two weekends ago, it goes something like this:

“It’s never been, ‘We’re doing this for the good of society.’ It’s always been us taking an intellectual pride in putting out a good product — and making money. If putting a computer on every desktop and in every home didn’t make money, we wouldn’t do it.”

That sums up most of the Microsoft people I know.

Microsoft, like any office, is a status theme park. Here’s a quick rundown:

• Profitable projects are galactically higher in status than loser (not quite as profitable) projects.

• Microsoft at Work (Digital Office) is sexiest at the moment. Fortune 500 companies are drooling over DO because it’ll allow them to downsize millions of employees. Basically, DO allows you to operate your fax, phone, copier — all of your office stuff — from your PC.

• Cash cows like Word are profitable but not really considered cutting edge.

• Working on-Campus is higher status than being relegated to one of the off-Campus Siberias.

• Having Pentium-driven hardware (built to the hilt) in your office is higher status than having 486 drone ware.

• Having technical knowledge is way up there.

• Being an architect is also way up there.

• Having Bill-o-centric contacts is way, way up there.

• Shipping your product on time is maybe the coolest (insert wave of anxiety here). If you ship a product you get a Ship-It award: a 12-x-15-x-1-inch Lucite slab — but you have to pretend it’s no big deal. Michael has a Ship-It award and we’ve tried various times to destroy it — blowtorching, throwing it off the verandah, dowsing it with acetone to dissolve it — nothing works. It’s so permanent, it’s frightening.

More roommate profiles:

First, Abe. If Abe were a Jeopardy! contestant, his seven dream categories would be:

• Intel assembly language

• Bulk shopping

• C++

• Introversion

• “I love my aquarium”

• How to have millions of dollars and not let it affect your life in any way

• Unclean laundry

Abe is sort of like the household Monopoly-game banker. He collects our monthly checks for the landlord, $235 apiece. The man has millions and he rents! He’s been at the group house since 1984, when he was hired fresh out of MIT. (The rest of us have been here, on average about eight months apiece.) After ten years of writing code, Abe so far shows no signs of getting a life. He seems happy to be reaching the age of 30 in just four months with nothing to his name but a variety of neat-o consumer electronics and boxes of Costco products purchased in rash moments of Costco-scale madness (“Ten thousand straws! Just think of it — only $10 and I’ll never need to buy straws ever again!”) These products line the walls of his room, giving it the feel of an air- raid shelter.

Bonus detail: There are dried-out patches of sneeze spray all over Abe’s monitors. You’d think he could afford 24 bottles of Windex.

Next, Todd. Todd’s seven Jeopardy! categories would be:

• Your body is your temple

• Baseball hats

• Meals made from combinations of Costco products

• Psychotically religious parents

• Frequent and empty sex

• SEGA Genesis gaming addiction

• The Supra

Todd works as a tester with me. He’s really young — 22 — the way Microsoft employees all used to be. His interest is entirely in girls, bug testing, his Supra, and his body, which he buffs religiously at the Pro Club gym and feeds with peanut butter quesadillas, bananas, and protein drinks.

Todd is historically empty. He neither knows nor cares about the past. He reads Car and Driver and fields three phone calls a week from his parents who believe that computers are “the Devil’s voice box,” and who try to persuade him to return home to Port Angeles and speak with the youth pastor.

Todd’s the most fun of all the house members because he is all impulse and no consideration. He’s also the only roomie to have clean laundry consistently. In a crunch you can always borrow an unsoiled shirt from Todd.

Bug Barbecue’s seven Jeopardy! categories would be:

• Bitterness

• Xerox PARC nostalgia

• Macintosh products

• More bitterness

• Psychotic loser friends