Microserfs

COUNT CHOCULA — FRANKENBERRY: Reason this cereal is not decadent:

Gay relationship offers an excellent role model for this new era of diversity. Witty vampire motif plays on never-ending struggle of the oppressed to topple the ruling classes.

On the same theme, from Abe:

I have settled up on the calorie delivery system of choice: Stouffer’s home sytle fish fillet with macaroni and chees. Microuaues in six minutes; 430 caloreis. Eat two of them and you don’t have to think of food for 5 hours. Beverage: Tang.

Do you like the Airbus R300?

TUESDAY

Dad got the Delta job! “My boss is 32 and a little prick if you ask me, but I’m in the real world now.” He starts next week. We offered to take him out to dinner, but he and Mom took a taxi down to II Fornaio in Palo Alto. They wanted to get pissed. My parents!

We had this competition inside the office to come up with alternative solutions as to what to do with what is (to the Russians) the increasingly embarrassing and willfully nondecomposing body of Vladimir I. Lenin. The suggestions:

SUSAN:

“Put Lenin in a tuxedo and use him as a seat filler at the Academy Awards. At the Oscar ceremonies they have this big holding pen full of attractive people in gowns and tuxes and whenever the Academy gives away the awards for achievement in sound and everyone flees into the lobby, seat fillers are zoomed in so that the cameras scanning the audience won’t register any vacant seats. When Daniel Day-Lewis has to go to the bathroom, the cameras could zoom in and see a picture of Sigourney Weaver sitting next to … Leninl”

DUSTY:

“The Reagans would, like, probably rilly enjoy having Lenin in their billiard room in Santa Barbara. They could put him inside a fake suit of armor (which they no doubt already own) and then when Henry Kissinger came over, Nancy could say, “Ooh, Henry—who do you think we have here tonight with us,” and she could skreeeek open the little faceplate and there would be—Lenin! —and they could all giggle.”

BUG:

“The Lenster’s dead, but that doesn’t mean he can’t endorse products, does it? At the very least, Benetton could fit him into one of their sweaters. That’s a two-page magazine spread right there. Revlon? Len Babe must look like hell after all these years. Maybe Clinique has some nice, youthful goo they could slap onto his face — a makeover! Makeovers are the official art form of the 1990s, you know.”

Dusty tried to get us to do aerobics in mid-afternoon, but all she got were six insolent stares. She, like, jogs to Oakland during her lunch hour or something. People in the Bay Area are so extreme.

Ethan is getting involved in an Antarctic banking scheme: “No regulation!” I bet if the Chicago futures market started selling plutonium futures, Ethan would be in like spit.

Look and Feel and the gerbil babies make a real racket now. The way they race around the office … it’s as if the walls are alive.

It turns out that three of us visited the Gap independently of each other today, and when we found out, we got spooked, and we analyzed the Gap, trying to make ourselves feel better about our vague mood of consumer victimization.

Susan says the Gap is smart because they cut it both ways: “Kids in Armpit, Nebraska, go into a Gap with pictures in their heads of Manhattan, Claudia Schiffer, and the Concorde, while kids in Manhattan go into the Gap with a picture in their head of Armpit, Nebraska. So it’s as though Gap clothing puts you anywhere except where you actually are.”

Bug said that the Gap is good “because you can go into a Gap anywhere, buy anything they sell, and never have to worry about coming out and looking like a dweeb wearing whatever it was you bought there.”

Susan responded that the only problem now is that everybody shops at the Gap (or an isotope of the Gap) and so everybody looks the same these days. “This is such a punchline because diversity is supposed to be such a hot modern issue, but to look at a sample crowd of citizens, you’d never know it.”

I figured that Gap clothing is what you wear if you want to appear like you’re from nowhere; it’s clothing that allows you to erase geographical differences and be just like everybody else from anywhere else.

Dusty agreed, saying this is good in that it spoke vaguely of social democratic notions, promoting the illusion of a unified, consensual monoculture, “But it’s maybe li’l bit sad, because this is all that democracy’s rilly been reduced to: the ability to purchase the illusion of cohesive citizenry for $34.99 (belt included).”

We also figured that Gap clothing isn’t about place, nor is it about time, either. Not only does Gap clothing allow you to look like you’re from nowhere in particular, it also allows you to look as though you’re not particularly from the present, either. “Just look at the recent ‘Khakis of the Dead’ campaign,” said Bug. “By using Balanchine and Andy Warhol and all these dead people to hustle khakis, the Gap permits Gap wearer to dissociate from the now and enter a nebulous then, wherever one wants then to be in one’s head … this big place that stretches from Picasso’s ‘20s to the hippie ‘60s.”

Todd wasn’t there, so we didn’t bother asking if Lenin wore khakis.

Karla pointed out that there are more Gaps than just the Gap. “J. Crew is a thinly veiled Gap. So is Eddie Bauer. Banana Republic is owned by the same people as the Gap. Armani A/X is a EuroGap. Brooks Brothers is a Gap for people with more disposable income whose bodies need hiding, upscaling, and standardization. Victoria’s Secret is a Gap of calculated naughtiness for ladies. McDonald’s is the Gap of hamburgers. LensCrafters is the Gap of eyewear. Mrs. Fields is the Gap of cookies. And so on.”

Susan said that the unifying theme amid all of this Gappiness is, of course, the computer spreadsheet and the bar-coded inventory. “A jaded cosmopolite in the Upper West Side buys an Armpit, Nebraska-style worker’s shirt (in ‘oatmeal’) and Gap computers” (doubtless buried deep within a deactivated NORAD command center somewhere in the Rockies) “instantaneously spew out the message to Asian garment manufacturers, ‘Armpit worker shirts are HOT.‘ Likewise, an agrarian soul out there in Armpit, pining away for a touch of life away from the silo, buys an oxford cloth button-down shirt at the local Gap, and computerized Gap-funded looms in Asia retool for the preppie revival.”

Bug said that, “Deep in your heart, you go to the Gap because you hope that they’ll have something that other Gap stores won’t have … even the most meager deviation from their highly standardized inventoried norm becomes a valued treasure. It’s like when you go into a McDonald’s and they’re test-marketing Lamb McNuggets, or something, and you know that it’s an experiment.”

Ethan broke in and agreed wholeheartedly: “Last December at the Eaton’s Centre in Toronto I purchased a ‘GP 2000’ Commander Picard-like red-and-black sweatshirt that I have yet to see in a Gap anywhere else. Was this a test-marketing of a new line that tanked, or a marketing SKU that simply bombed? I ask you.”

Then Michael pointed out that a few years ago there was a minor furor over the ethics of Dairy Queen, who sent their franchisees hamburger patties that were pseudo-randomly shaped, with little bumpies around the patty’s edges, so that burger’s consumer would feel more as though they were having a “handmade” burger. “In this same spirit, one wonders if the Gap randomly assigns nonstandardized clothing items to its various outlets so as to simulate the illusion of regional variety.”

To break the trance that was forming, I shouted, “Gap check!” and everyone in the office had to guiltily ‘fess up to the number of Gap garments currently being worn. Karla, the only Gap-free soul, for