Microserfs

• Jazz

• Still more bitterness

Bug Barbecue is the World’s Most Bitter Man. He is (as his name implies) a tester with me at Building Seven. His have-a-life factor is pretty near zero. He has the smallest, darkest room in the house, in which he maintains two small shrines: one to his Sinclair ZX-81, his first computer, and the other to supermodel Elle MacPherson. Man, she’d freak if she saw the hundreds of little photos — the coins, the candles, the little notes.

Bug is 31, and he lets everyone know it. If we ever ask him so much as “Hey, Bug — have you seen volume 7 of my Inside Mac?” he gives a sneer and replies, “You’re obviously of the generation that never built their own motherboard or had to invent their own language.”

Hey, Bug — we love you, too.

Bug never gets offered stock by the company. When payday comes and the little white stock option envelopes with red printing reading “Personal and Confidential” end up in all of our pigeonholes, Bug’s is always, alas, empty. Maybe they’re trying to get rid of him, but it’s almost impossible to fire someone at Microsoft. It must drive the administration nuts. They hired 3,100 people in 1992 alone, and you know not all of them were gems.

Oddly, Bug is fanatical in his devotion to Microsoft. It’s as if the more they ignore him, the more rabidly he defends their honor. And if you cherish your own personal time, you will not get into a discussion with him over the famous Look-&-Feel lawsuit or any of the FTC or Department of Justice actions:

“These litigious pricks piss me off. I wish they’d compete in the marketplace where it really counts instead of being little wusses and whining for government assistance to compete….”

You’ve been warned.

Finally, Michael. Michael’s seven Jeopardy! categories would be:

• FORTRAN

• Pascal

• Ada (defense contracting code)

• LISP

• Neil Peart (drummer for Rush)

• Hugo and Nebula award winners

• Sir Lancelot

Michael is probably the closest I’ll ever come to knowing someone who lives in a mystical state. He lives to assemble elegant streams of code instructions. He’s like Mozart to everyone else’s Salieri — he enters people’s offices where lines of code are written on the dry-erase whiteboards and quietly optimizes the code as he speaks to them, as though someone had written wrong instructions on how to get to the beach and he was merely setting them right so they wouldn’t get lost.

He often uses low-tech solutions to high-tech problems: Popsicle sticks, rubber bands, and little strips of paper that turn on a bent coat hanger frame help him solve complex matrix problems. When he moved offices into his new window office (good coder, good office), he had to put Post-it notes reading “Not Art” on his devices so that the movers didn’t stick them under the glass display cases out in the central atrium area.

SUNDAY

This morning before heading to the office I read an in-depth story about Burt and Loni’s divorce in People magazine. Thus, 1,474,819 brain cells that could have been used toward a formula for world peace were obliterated. Are computer memory and human memory analogous? Michael would know.

Mid-morning, I mountain-biked over to Nintendo headquarters, across Interstate 520 from Microsoft.

Now, I’ve never been to the South African plant of, say, Sandoz Pharmaceuticals, but I bet it looks a lot like Nintendo headquarters — two-story industrial-plex buildings sheathed with Death Star-black windows and landscape trees around the parking lot seemingly clicked into place with a mouse. It’s nearly identical to Microsoft except Microsoft uses sea foam-green glass on its windows and has big soccer fields should it ever really need to expand.

I Hacky Sacked for a while with my friend, Marty, and some of his tester friends during their break. Sunday is a big day for the kids who man the PSS phone lines there because all of young America is out of school and using the product. It’s really young at Nintendo. It’s like the year 1311, where everyone over 35 is dead or maimed and out of sight and mind.

All of us got into this big discussion about what sort of software dogs would design if they could. Marty suggested territory-marking programs with piss simulators and lick interfaces. Antonella thought of BoneFinder. Harold thought of a doghouse remodeling CAD system. All very cartographic/high sensory: lots of visuals.

Then, of course, the subject of catware came up. Antonella suggested a personal secretary program that tells the world, “No, I do not wish to be petted. Oh, and hold all my calls.” My suggestion was for a program that sleeps all the time.

Anyway, it’s a good thing we’re human. We design business spreadsheets, paint programs, and word processing equipment. So that tells you where we’re at as a species. What is the search for the next great compelling application but a search for the human identity?

It was nice being at Nintendo where everybody’s just a little bit younger and hipper than at Microsoft and actually takes part in the Seattle scene. Everyone at Microsoft seems, well, literally 31.2 years old, and it kind of shows.

There’s this eerie, science-fiction lack of anyone who doesn’t look exactly 31.2 on the Campus. It’s oppressive. It seems like only last week the entire Campus went through Gap ribbed-T mania together — and now they’re all shopping for the same 3bdrm/2bth dove-gray condo in Kirkland.

Microserfs are locked by nature into doing 31.2-ish things: the first house, the first marriage, the “where- am-I-going” crisis, the out-goes-the-Miata/in-comes-the-minivan thing, and, of course, major death denial. A Microsoft VP died of cancer a few months ago, and it was like, you weren’t allowed to mention it. Period. The three things you’re not allowed to discuss at work: death, salaries, and your stock options.

I’m 26 and I’m just not ready to turn 31.2 yet.

Actually, I’ve been thinking about this death denial business quite a bit lately. September always makes me think of Jed. It’s as if there’s this virtual Jed who might have been. Sometimes I see him when I’m driving by water; I see him standing on a log boom smiling and waving; I see him buckarooing a killer whale in the harbor off downtown while I’m stuck in traffic on the Alaskan Way viaduct. Or I see him walking just ahead of me around the Space Needle restaurant, always just around the curve.

I’d like to hope Jed is happy in the afterworld, but because I was raised without any beliefs, I have no pictures of an afterworld for myself. In the past I have tried to convince myself that there is no life after death, but I have found myself unable to do this, so I guess intuitively I feel there is something. But I just don’t know how to begin figuring out what these pictures are.

Over the last few weeks I’ve been oh-so-casually asking the people I know about their own pictures of the afterworld. I can’t simply come right out and ask directly because, as I say, you just don’t discuss death at Microsoft.

The results were pretty dismal. Ten people asked, and not one single image. Not one single angel or one bright light or even one single, miserable barbecue briquette. Zero.

Todd was more concerned about who would show up at his funeral.

Bug Barbecue told me all this depressing stuff, of how the constituent elements of his personality weren’t around before he was born, so why should he worry about what happens to them afterward?

Susan changed the topic entirely. (“Hey, isn’t Louis Gerstner hopeless?”)

Sometimes, in the employee kitchen, when I’m surrounded by the dairy cases full of Bill-supplied free beverages, I have to wonder if maybe Microsoft’s corporate zest for recycling aluminum, plastic,