Microserfs

Michael and Ethan broke down and told everyone the news — we have NO money. They made sure Dad wasn’t around for the news, which was nice. We’d more or less suspected this all along, so in the end it came as no surprise.

Suddenly Microsoft doesn’t look so bad. How could we have been so stupid to leave? Microsoft is a business first and only — not a social welfare state for 13,000 people who lucked in at the right moment.

Michael is petrified we might have to sell his Lego. “It’s so pretty — it would be murder … a sin … to take it all apart. And last week ID magazine came in to take its picture.”

The thing is, we agree about the Lego. It is too pretty to sell. Somewhere a few weeks ago, like a piece of DNA with just the right number of proteins added, it became alive. We can’t kill it.

Suddenly it occurred to me that Ethan could sell his Patek Phillipe watch. That’s 35 million yen right there. I said, “Ethan, sell your watch,” and he said, “I can’t believe you thought this was genuine,” and dropped it into the coffee pot saying, “Six dollars. Kowloon. 1991.”

We got nothing done in the afternoon. In fact we got drunk. We have no idea what we’re going to do. Work some more, I suppose.

Abe looks like he’s all set to go nonlinear. His e-mail is becoming telltale to an amazing degree:

At 21, you make this Faustian pact with yourself-that your company is allowed to soak up 7 to 10 years of your life-but then at 38 you have to abandon the company, or else there’s something WRONG with you.

The tech system feeds on bright, asocial kids from diveorced backgrounds who had pro-education parents. We ARE in a new industry; there aren’t really many older poeple in it. We are on the vanguard of adoldescence protraction.

As is common with Microsoft people I worked like a mental case throughout my 20s, and then hit this wall at thiry and went *SPLRT*.

But just think about the way high tech cultures purposefully protract out the adolescence of their employees well into their late 20s, if not their early 30s,. I mean, all those NERF TOUYS and FREE BEVERAGES! And the way tech firms won’t even call work “The office:, but instead, “the campus”.

It’s sick and evil. At least down in California YOU’RE not working on a campus.

With youre 30s begins “the closing” … you realize that it’ not going to be forever … the game becomes a lot more serious. People get more involved in their work.

Conundrum: I can’t imagine not giving myself fully to a job … 100% of me … but if I DO, I’d neuer “haue a life” (whateuer that means.) The problem is, who’d WANT to haue a job that couldn’t absorb you 100%??

SEE?

Back at the office, drunk, Susan demonstrated for us the Official Chyx handshake — all Chyx members greet each other by emulating the world-famous Farrah Fawcett simultaneous hair-flip-and-aim gesture, touching fingertips in mock gun-firing pose at the end of the gesture’s completion. Dusty, Karla, Michael, and Susan were in the Lego garden practicing, and it was like boot camp:

“Make it fluid, kids — remember, you’re sweeping twelve pounds of Texan corn-fed hair out of your eyes and readying a loaded Colt .45 almost simultaneously. There’s a slight flip of the neck involved, and the left gun-holding hand must reach horizontal position at exactly the same moment the hair-flipping finger has swept the hair and is ready to pull the trigger. Michael — a bit more grace. Dusty, what would Kelly, Jill, and Sabrina say about that jerkiness between the hair and the trigger? Take aim, Chyx. You are the world. Free your mind. Unplug. Plug in.”

Thought: all PC-style consumer electronics are the same oyster-gray color of Macintoshes. The guy who makes the gray pigment must be one rich pigment maker. And all TV-style things are black. What will be the color when TVs and PCs merge?

SUNDAY

Abe has defected! Susan was on CNN! What a day! Exclamation marks!

First of all, Abe arrived with a U-Haul filled with 10,000 plastic drinking straws, Jif, a bed, and, hopefully, a Scrooge McDuck-like heap of money. He entered our Hamilton Street office around noon wearing his Starship Enterprise T-shirt. I said to him, “Hi, Abe, welcome home,” and he said, “Hello, Daniel. I’m having my trampoline shipped down — even though it would probably be cheaper to buy one here.”

He paused here and looked about the Lego garden. “It would be a shame not to bring the trampster with me, you know—such a useful metaphor for labor in the 1990s.” He scanned the room further, seemingly unfazed by its colorful shock value, and pulled a plump-looking Costco bag out from underneath his armpit. “Oh, hello, Michael … I brought you some cheese slices to help us through those all-nighters. Now please tell me, just where is my space going to be?”

Abe had a brief meeting with Michael and Ethan ran out shouting, “We’re liquid! We’re liquid! We really are the liquid engineers. Daniel … how do you spell relief? Spell it, C-A-P-I-T-A-L.”

Indeed, Abe is becoming an equity partner. He’s going to help Michael out as a “senior” engineer and finish some core low-level code for him. Not only that but, in the interim until he finds a place to live, Abe is also moving in with Ethan up at the Dirty Harry house, and Ethan’s overjoyed at the prospect of cash. Ethan was like that old cartoon dog character who, every time he received a bone, his ears would twirl up like a helicopter, his body would rise into the sky, and then he would float down to the earth in limp abandon.

Abe said, “People without lives like to hang out with other people who don’t have lives. Thus they form lives.” Even better, he’ll have company.

CNN: we bootlegged a coaxial cable line in from the next office over and had it blasting on the monitor all day, watching “our Susan” every hour on the hour until around six o’clock, demonstrating for 137 countries around the world the Official Chyx handshake, discussing gender-blindness in the tech world, and, best of all, sneaking in her Net address.

It was very “TV.” After 6:00, her segment was replaced by a segment on toilet training your cat.

Susan never even told us she did a CNN interview. But she came across so well. She’s a star! And already her Chyx mailbox on our little Oop! node is jammed with responses. Susan, wearing a T-shirt portraying gender intelligence researcher Brenda Laurel that she had custom- made at Kinko’s, was radiantly happy — not just at seeing her equity in Oop! saved at the last minute by Abe’s money bin, but in seeing Chyx explode internationally. “Quelle plug for Chyx,” she said, obviously thrilled. “And that Chyx handshake looked so good on TV. Best idea I ever had.”

We celebrated all of the day’s news with sundown drinks at the Empire Tap Room, and people were coming up to Susan and saying, “You’re the smart one!” and Susan admitted that she, indeed, identified with Kate Jackson on Charlie’s Angels.

Michael mixed Robitussin with his Calistoga water. We asked him if the drink had a name and he said, “I hereby christen this drink ‘the Justine Bateman’ after the lovely and talented sister character, Mallory, of TV’s beloved mid-eighties sitcom, Family Ties.”

Abe felt left out and wanted to invent a drink, too, so he put two Redoxon vitamin tablets into his diet Coke and rum and christened it a “Tina Yothers,” “the smart, sassy younger sister of the above-mentioned TV sitcom.”

We then tormented the staff by demanding those European layered drinks with all of the various liqueurs of varying specific gravities in tall, thin glasses. Dusty called the drinks “metaphor for the class system,” and we were all weirded-out because we remembered she used to be so political and now she just changes the subject whenever it comes up.

Then, because so many people in the Bay Area have tattoos, we lapsed into a discussion of the subject. In the end, we all basically decided, “Yuck,” all except for Bug who is still considering a lifetime of body mutilation with an earring appointment he has next week. Bug was actually being a bit mopey —