Microserfs

5 TrekPolitiks

MONDAY January 17, 1994

An earthquake hit Los Angeles at 4:31 this morning and the images began arriving via CNN right away. Karla and I stayed home to watch, and when Ethan, a Simi Valley boy, heard about it on the radio driving in from San Carlos, he ran right through our front yard’s sprinkler to watch our TV. (His own Cablevision bill remains unpaid.) Damage seemed to be localized but extreme — the San Fernando Valley, Northridge, Van Nuys, and parts of Santa Monica and Pacific Palisades.

“The freeways!” moaned Ethan. “My beloved freeways — Antelope Valley, ripped and torn, the 405, rubble — the Santa Monica freeway at La Cienega — all collapsed.”

We’d never seen Ethan cry. At the sight of some particularly devastated overpass, he told me, “I kissed my first date beside that off-ramp — we’d sit on the embankments and watch the cars go by.”

Anyway, it really did make us sad to see all of this glorious infrastructure in ruins, like a crippled giant. We ate breakfast, leafed through the Handbook of Highway Engineering (1975), and watched all the collapsed structures.

Mom made us hot chocolate before she went to the library and then dropped us off at the office on her way. Ethan was a mess all day.

Dad quit his night course in C++ because all of the kids in his class were seventeen and they just stared at him and didn’t think he could be a student because he was too old. The students were saying things to each other like, “If he comes too close to you shout, ‘You’re not my father!’ as loud as you can.” Kids are so cruel.

So we’re going to teach Dad C++ instead.

Random moment: This afternoon I was in the McDonald’s on El Camino Real near California Street and they had this Lucite box with a slot on top where people put their business cards. It was stuffed with cards. Really stuffed.

But the weird thing was, I couldn’t locate anything on the box saying what the cards were to be used for. So I guess it’s just this human instinct to stick your business card in a slot. Like you’re going to win … what—a free orange drink machine for your birthday party? I saw a woman’s card from Hewlett-Packard and a card from some guy in Mexico saying “Graduate from Stanford Graduate School of Business.” Here’s this Stanford graduate at McDonald’s putting his card in a box at random. I just don’t understand people sometimes. Didn’t he learn anything at Stanford?

Geek party tonight. Relief! Without geek parties, we’d never see anybody but OURSELVES, day in, day out. And the big news of the day was that Karla and I found a place to house-sit — it belongs to a woman who got the layoff package from Apple. We move in this weekend (yayyy!), and the move comes as some relief as the Karla/Mom not communicating thing is oddly wearing on all of us.

The party: It was in San Francisco (the “sit-tay,” as now cooler-than-us-by-virtue-of-living-there Bug and Susan call it), in Noe Valley at Ann and Jorge’s, Anatole’s friends. Jorge’s with Sun Microsystems and Ann’s with 3DO. There were LARGE quantities of delicious, snobby San Francisco food, great liquor, industry gossip, and TVs displaying earthquake damage all over the apartment. Since us Oop!sters are all broke, we saved pots of money by not eating all day before the party. We never eat before geek parties.

In the moneyed world of Silicon Valley, nothing is uncooler than being broke. Karla and I were both curious to see how Ann and Jorge live. When we arrived, I was overwhelmed by the hipness factor. And where are the GEEKS? Everyone was dressed…. like real people. Where were the ironic fridge magnets? The futons? The IKEA furniture? The Nerf products? The house looked as though it had been made over by Martha Stewart. There were REAL couches, obviously purchased NEW, in red velvet with gold and silver silk throw pillows; Matisse-derived area rugs; little candles everywhere; a REAL dining table with SIX chairs around it in its OWN ROOM with vases and bowls full of pine cones on the mantel. These people were like ADULTS … seamless!

Susan said they’ve merely disguised their evidence of not having a life: “I mean, it’s like you go to somebody’s house for Thanksgiving and they’ve spent eighteen hours covering the rooms with little orange squashes and quinces and crepe paper, and the meal is like Henry the Eighth, and you can’t eat because you get this creepy sick feeling that the person who did the dinner has nothing else to do with their life. It’s the dark side of Martha Stewart’s Living.”

Ethan said Susan still felt guilty for putting too much work and money into our gift baskets at Christmas.

I thought that overdecoration and nice houses might be the regional version of the never-used kayak in the garage up at Microsoft. But a darker thought emerged: these may possibly be techies who HAVE A LIFE, and they’re upping the ante for the rest of us.

Susan, in spite of ragging on the decor with us, started fellating our hostess, Ann, over the subject of houses. They were talking about some expensive store in Pacific Heights where no doubt all of this furniture comes from.

Ann: “Fillamento, it’s on Fillmore and Sacramento. They have the best stuff, I just got this amazing coverlet for our bed there. They had to special-order it from Germany, but it is so gorgeous … do you want to see it?”

Susan: “Of course!”

Off they went, comparing decor purchases. You’d never know that Ann used to be a chip designer.

The local rage is obscure, expensive premium vodkas — it’s the litmus of cool at geek parties. Later on, Susan, Karla, and I were standing around drinking Ketel-1, when some guy who’d been checking Karla out came up and said, “Hi, I’m Phil, I’m a PDA.”

PDAs are what Newton is — it’s an acronym for Personal Digital Assistant.

“You look more analog than digital,” Susan oh-so-wittily batted back at him.

“It stands for Peons Down at Apple!” Phil chortled, ignoring Susan, and zooming in on KARLA. It was really embarrassing, because Susan wasn’t picking up on the fact that she was being ignored by Phil. Karla was grossed out by Phil, and I was on red alert about this big hulk zooming in on Karla. I inserted myself between him and Karla. “Maybe it stands for Public Display of Affection.” I put my arm around Karla and introduced everybody.

Susan was laughing at Phil’s jokes — she’s so desperate for a dating architecture in her life, and when Phil turned around Karla mouthed the words: REMOVE HIM FROM MY LIFE to Susan, then grabbed my shoulder, and we went off to the den to marvel at the amount of stuff owned by our hosts. We felt like East Germans visiting West Germany for the first time. Phil, meanwhile, sensing defeat, finally noticed Susan, and began chatting her up.

For the next hour, we watched Phil regale Susan with exciting tales of product meetings, shipping deadlines, engineering crises, and code names for products.

I can’t stop marveling at how together geeks are in the Valley. At Microsoft, there was no peer pressure to do anything except work and ship on time. If you did, you got a Ship-it Award. Easy. Black and White.

Here, it’s so much more complicated — you’re supposed to have an exciting, value-adding job that utilizes your creativity, a wardrobe from Nordstrom’s or at the very least Banana Republic, a $400,000 house, a cool European or Japanese car, the perfect relationship with someone as ambitious, smart, and well-dressed as yourself, and extra money to throw parties so that the whole world can observe what a life you have, indeed. It makes me miss Redmond, but at the same time, it is kind of inspiring. I feel conflicted.

Even Michael noticed, with a rare lapse into pop culture: “Perhaps David Byrne was talking about the geeks inheriting the earth in that Talking Heads song, ‘This is not my beautiful house! This is not my beautiful wife! My God! How did I get here?”’

Bug talked to a guy who’s a game producer at a company called PF Magic. (What’s up with all of these companies named “Magic”? Is it some New Age/George Lucas-type deal or what?