Microserfs

Time time time. It’s such a current subject. It’s like money — if you don’t have it, you think about it too much.

Karla’s been thinking about time, too. Tonight during shiatsu training, with me flat on my stomach, my back and sides being poked and pummeled, her voice, disconnected from her body, informed me that in general, “One’s perception of time’s flow is directly linked to the number of connections one has to the outer world. Technology increases the number of connections, thus it alters the perception of having ‘experienced’ time.

“It’s a bell-curve relationship. There’s actually an optimum point at which the amount of technology one owns extends the amount of time one perceives or experiences.

“It’s as if your brain holds a tiny, cashew-shaped thalamus going tick-tick-tick while it meters out your time dosage for you. There’s a technological equilibrium point, after which, it’s all downhill.”

Abe e-mailed a response to my time stuff:

Once you’ve used your brain flat-out, you can’t go into the SLOW mode. You can’t drive an Infinite J-3B and then get downgraded to an Daewoo. Brains don’t workd that way.

WEDNESDAY

This morning Dad was singing “Road to Nowhere.” Michael is reprogramming my father. I have to figure out a way of dealing with this.

Whenever Anatole gets too European and insufferable — complaining too much, basically — we say to him, “Hey, Anatole, your turtleneck’s showing.” He doesn’t get this particular joke. “But I am not wearing a turtleneck …”

Anatole told us this really great thing, how at Apple they used to have a thing called RumorMonger that allowed employees to anonymously input up to one hundred ASCII characters worth of gossip into the system. So Todd hacked together a quick in-house version for our network, called Rumor-Meister. It got way out of control almost immediately:

1) SUSAN SHOPS AT TARGET BUT PUTS HER STUFF IN NORDSTROM BAGS

2) DANIEL SELLS HIS USED BOXERS VIA MAIL ORDER … $5.00 PER DAY OF WEAR

3) BUG SWEATS TO THE OLDIES

4) DAN … THOSE DOCKERS … HIP!

5) TODD HAS SAGGY NIPPLES FROM TOO MUCH BODY BUILDING THEY’RE CALLED ‘BITCH TITS’

5) TODD WEARZ DEPENDS WHEN HE BENCH PRESSES BECUZ UTHERWIZE HE’LL EVACUATE HIS BOWELS ON THE BENCH

7) KARLA PAID TO SEE “THE BODY GUARD”

8) BUG LAUGHS AT GARFIELD CARTOONS

9) KARLA CAN’T ACCESSORIZE

10) SUSAN HAS COMBINATION SKIN

11) TODD SMOKES ‘MORE’ CIGARETTES

12) I CAN HEAR KARLA’S COLOSTOMY BAG SLOSHING

13) ETHAN’S FERRARI IS A KIT CAR

14) ETHAN BUYS TIRES AT SEARS

15) BUG LOVES BARNEY

16) KARLA THINKS SHE’S A SUMMER BUT SHE’S REALLY A FALL

17) BUG HAS 2 RAFFI CASSETTES

18) DAN HAS A YANNI CD IN HIS CAR

19) ETHAN’S VISA LIMIT IS $3,000

20) SUZAN’Z BOYCRAZY SUZAN’Z BOYCRAZY SUZAN’Z BOYCRAZY SUZAN’Z BOYCRAZY SUZAN’Z BOYCRAZY

21) DAN: LISTERINE KILLS GERMS THAT CAN CAUSE BAD BREATH

22) DAN STILL LIVES WITH HIS MOTHER

23) BUG SHOPS AT CHESS KING

24) MICHAEL’S SHIRT SMELL LIKE GERBIL PEE

Todd quickly removed the program from the system.

Ethan had a time crisis. “I look at my Daytimer and see: CES in January, COMDEX in May, Tim’s wedding in July, etc., and I realize the whole year is over before it’s even begun. What’s the point of it all? It’s all of it so predictable.”

Mom won a swim meet this afternoon, so we dug out the nickels from under the seat cushions and went out for a low-fat dinner to celebrate. She’s so fit these days.

I was driving down from the 280, down Peter Coutts Road, up by Systemix, Wall Data, IBM, Hewlett Packard, and the Wall Street Journal printing plant — up where Dad used to work before he was rendered obsolete — and who should I see taking a stroll together but Dad and Michael! They were lost in discussion, their arms donnishly held behind their backs.

I pulled the car into a side street and ran out to join them. Upon hearing me yell their names, they turned around, absentmindedly interrupted, utterly unfazed at seeing me. I asked what they were doing and Dad said, “Oh, you know — just taking a stroll past the old hunting grounds” (IBM).

Cars hummed by. A tech firm’s lawn sprinkler spritzed. I didn’t know what to say, surrounded by all these blank buildings with glassed-out windows, these buildings where they make the machines that make the machines that make the machines.

I began walking up the hill with them and shortly we were in front of IBM. I felt humiliated for my father, because surely there’d be employees behind the reflecto windows saying, “Oh look, it’s Mr. Underbill stalking us. He must have really lost it.”

But Dad seemed unfazed. I said, “Dad, how can you even look at those people?”

He replied, “You know, Daniel, I have noticed that people are generally quite thrilled to have change enter their lives — disasters are weathered by people with a sturdiness that is often unlike their day-to-day personality.”

Michael piped in, “Just think of the Mississippi River floods. All those people having barbecues up on their roofs, waving to the CNN helicopters — having a grand old time.”

“Precisely,” said Dad. “I’ve realized that people most dread the thought of actually initiating change in their lives and we old people are obviously the worst. It’s hard coping with chaos and diversity. We old folks mistake the current deluge of information, diversity, and chaos as the ‘End of History.’ But maybe it’s actually the Beginning.”

This sounded like Michael-style words coming out of my father’s mouth. Brainwashed!

He continued. “Old people have more or less dropped out of the process of creating old-fashioned-style history. We’ve been pushed to the side, and nobody’s pointed out to us what we, the newly obsolete humans, are supposed to do.”

“The only thing that is immune to change is our desire for meaning,” added Michael, to my overweening annoyance.

We scurried across the street during a lull in the Lexuses, and began walking down the hill. “Don’t ask me to explain this eight-jobs-in-a-lifetime reality we now inhabit. I could barely deal with the one-job-in-a-lifetime world,” Dad said.

The sun was golden — birds swung in the sky. Cars purred at a stoplight. Dad looked so relaxed and happy. “I always assumed that history was created by think tanks, the DOE and the RAND Corporation of Santa Monica, California. I assumed that history was something that happened to other people — out there. I never thought history was something my kid built in the basement. It’s a shock.”

I told him about the new word I’d learned, deletia, and Dad laughed. “That’s