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MONDAY
Dad got fired! Didn’t we see that one coming a mile away. This whole restructuring business.
Mom phoned around 11:00 A.M. and she spent only ten minutes giving me the news. She had to get back to Dad, who was out on the back patio, in shock, looking out over Silicon Valley. She said we’ll have to talk longer tomorrow. I got off the phone and my head was buzzing.
The results came in from the overnight stress tests — the tests we run to try to locate bugs in the code — and there were five breaks. Five! So I had my work cut out for me today. Nine days until shipping.
Right.
I telephoned Susan over in Mac Applications. The news about Dad was too important for e-mail, and we had lunch together in the big cafeteria in Building Sixteen that resembles the Food Fair at any halfway decent mall. Today was Mongolian sticky rice day.
Susan was hardly surprised about IBM dumping Dad. She told me that when she was briefly on the OS/2 version 1.0 team, they sent her to the IBM branch in Boca Raton for two weeks. Apparently IBM was asking people from the data entry department whether they wanted to train to be programmers.
“If they hadn’t been doing boneheaded shit like that, your dad would still have a job.”
I’ve been thinking: I get way too many pieces of e-mail, about 60 a day. This is a typical number at Microsoft. E-mail is like highways — if you have them, traffic follows.
I’m an e-mail addict. Everybody at Microsoft is an addict. The future of e-mail usage is being pioneered right here. The cool thing with e-mail is that when you send it, there’s no possibility of connecting with the person on the other end. It’s better than phone answering machines, because with them, the person on the other line might actually pick up the phone and you might have to talk.
Typically, everybody has about a 40 percent immediate cull rate — those pieces of mail you can delete immediately because of a frivolous tag line. What you read of the remaining 60 percent depends on how much of a life you have. The less of a life, the more mail you read.
Abe has developed a “rules-based” software program that anticipates his e-mail preferences and sifts and culls accordingly. I guess that’s sort of like Antonella’s personal secretary program for cats.
After lunch, I drove down 156th Avenue to the Uwajimaya Japanese supermarket and bought Karla some seaweed and cucumber rolls. They also sell origami paper by the sheet there, so I threw in some cool colored papers as an extra bonus.
When I got back to the office, I knocked on Karla’s door and gave her the rolls and the paper. She seemed glad enough to see me (she didn’t scowl) and genuinely surprised that I had brought her something.
She asked me to sit in her office. She has a big poster of a MIPS chip blueprint on her wall and some purple and pink flowers in a bud vase, just like Mary Tyler Moore. She said that it was kind of me to bring her a Japanese seaweed roll and everything, but at the moment she was in the middle of a pack of Skittles. Would I like some?
And so we sat and ate Skittles. I told her about my dad and she just listened. And then she told me that her own father operates a small fruit cannery in Oregon. She said that she learned about coding from canning lines — or rather, she developed a fascination for linear logic processes there — and she actually has a degree in manufacturing processes, not computer programming. And she folded one of those origami birds for me. Her IQ must be about 800.
IQs are one of the weird things about Microsoft — you only find the right-hand side of the bell curve on-Campus. There’s nobody who’s two-digit. Just one more reason it’s such a sci-fi place to work.
Anyway, we started talking more about all of the fiftysomethings being dumped out of the economy by downsizing. No one knows what to do with these people, and it’s so sad, because being 50 nowadays isn’t like being 50 a hundred years ago when you’d probably be dead.
I told Karla about Bug Barbecue’s philosophy: If you can’t make yourself worthwhile to society, then that’s your problem, not society’s. Bug says people are personally responsible for keeping themselves relevant. Somehow, this doesn’t seem quite right to me.
Karla speaks with such precision. It’s so cool. She said that everyone worrying about rioting senior citizens is probably premature. She said that it’s a characteristic of where we are right now on computer technology’s ease- of-use curve that fiftysomethings are a bit slow at accepting technology.
“Our generation has all of the characteristics needed to be in the early-adopter group — time for school and no pesky unlearning to be done. But the barriers for user acceptance should be vanishing soon enough for fiftysomethings.”
This made me feel better for Dad.
Michael came by just then to ask about a subroutine and I realized it was time for me to leave. Karla thanked me again for the food, and I was glad I had brought it along.
