Right outside the Admin Building.
I realize I haven’t seen a movie in six months. I think the last one was
It turns out Abe has entrepreneurial aspirations. We had dinner in the downstairs cafeteria together (Indonesian Bamay with frozen yogurt and double espresso). He’s thinking of quitting and becoming a pixelation broker — going around to museums and buying the right to digitize their paintings. It’s a very “Rich Microsoft” thing to do. Microsoft’s millionaires are the first generation of North American nerd wealth.
Once Microsofters’ ships come in, they travel all over: Scotland and Patagonia and Thailand …
It’s all low-key spending, mostly, and fresh and fun. Nobody’s buying crypts, I notice — though when the time comes that they do, said crypts will no doubt be emerald and purple colored, and lined with Velcro and Gore- Tex.
Abe, like most people here, is a fiscal Republican, but otherwise, pretty empty-file in the ideology department. Vesting turns most people into fiscal Republicans, I’ve noticed.
The day went quickly. The rain is back again, which is nice. The summer was too hot and too dry for a Washington boy like me.
I am going to bring in some Japanese UFO-brand yaki soba tomorrow and see if Karla is into lunch. She needs carbs. Skittles and aspartame is no diet for a coder.
Well, actually, it is.
A thought: Sometimes the clouds and sunlight will form in a way you’ve never seen them do before, and your city will feel as if it’s another city altogether. On the Campus today at sunset, people were stopping on the grass watching the sun turn stove-filament orange through the rain clouds.
It’s just something I noticed. It made me realize that the sun is really built of fire. It made me feel like an animal, not a human.
Worked until 1:30 A.M. When I got in, Abe was down in his microbrewery in the garage, puttering amid the stacks of furniture handed down by parents — stuff too ugly to meet even the minimal taste standards of the upstairs rooms, the piles of golf clubs, the mountain bikes, and a line of suitcases, perched like greyhounds awaiting the word GO!
Bug was locked behind his door, but by the smell I could tell he was eating a microwaved Dinty Moore product.
Susan was in the living room asleep in front of a taped
Todd was obsessively folding his shirts in his room.
Michael was rereading
A nice average night.
I went into my room, which, like all six of the bedrooms here, is filled up almost completely with a bed, with walls lined with IKEA “Billy” bookshelves and stereo equipment, jazz posters and Sierra Club calendars. On my desk sits a Sudafed box and a pile of stones from a beach in Oregon. My PC is hooked up by modem to the Campus.
Had a Tab (a Bill favorite) and some microwave popcorn and did some unfinished work.
WEDNESDAY
Well, it would seem that Bug Barbecue’s theory might be correct after all. Michael got invited to lunch today with (oh God, I can barely input the letters …) B-B-B-B-B-I-L-L!
The news traveled around Building Seven like lightning just around 11:30. Needless to say, we tumbled into Bug’s office like puppies within seconds of getting word, tripping over his piles of soldering guns, wires, R-Kive boxes, and empty CD jewel boxes. Of course, he went mad with grief. We totally needled him:
“You know, Bug, the deciding factor must have been Michael’s walking over that berm and making that incredible shortcut. I tell you, Bill saw Michael make that call of genius and now I bet he’s going to give Michael his own product group. You shouldn’t have listened to us, man. We’re losers. We’re going nowhere. Now, Michael — he’s a winner.”
Actually, the invitation probably had more to do with the code Michael wrote during the bunkering last Friday, but we didn’t tell Bug this.
During the two hours Michael was away, time ticked by slowly. The curiosity was unbearable and we were all giddy and restless. We emerged from our offices into corridors of caged whimsy, amid our
We lapsed into one of our weekly-ish communal stress-relieving frenzies — we swiped sheets of bubble-pak from the supply rooms and rolled over them with our office chairs, popping hundreds of plastic zits at a go. We punished plastic troll dolls with 5-irons, blasting them down the hallway, putting yet more divots in the particle board walls and the ceiling panels. We drank Tabs and idly slagged interactive CD technology (Todd: “I used the Philips CDI system — it’s like trying to read a coffee table book with all of the pages glued together.”).
Finally Michael came back and walked past everybody, oblivious to the sensation of his presence, and entered his office. I walked over to his door.
“Hi, Michael.” Pause. “So
“Hello, Daniel. I have to fly to Cupertino tonight. Some kind of Macintosh assignment they’re putting me on.”
“What was, well—
“Oh, you know … efficient. People forget that he is medically, biologically, a genius. Not one ummm or ahhhh from his mouth all lunch; no wasted brain energy. Truly an inspiration for us all. I told him about my Flatlander flat- foods-only concept, and we then got into a discussion of beverages, which, as you know, tend to be consumed with a straw in a linear, one-dimensional (and hence not two-dimensional) mode. Beverages are a real problem to my new Flatlander dining lifestyle, Daniel, let me tell you.
“But then Bill—” (first name basis!) “—pointed out that one-dimensionality is perfectly allowable within a two-dimensional universe. So obvious, yet I hadn’t seen it! Good thing he’s in charge. Oh — Daniel, can I borrow your suitcase? Mine has all my old Habitrail gerbil mazes in it, and I don’t want to take them out and then have to repack them all when I return.”
“Sure, Michael.”
“Thanks.” He booted up his computer. “I guess I’d better prepare for the trip. Where did I store that file — you’d think Lucy Ricardo handled my information for me. Well, Daniel — we’ll talk later on?” He looked for something underneath a cardboard box containing a ‘60s Milton-Bradley game of Memory.
He then looked up at me, gave me an ‘I want to return to the controllable and nonthreatening world inside my computer’ stare. You have to respect this, so the rest of the crew and I left him inside his office, clicking away on his board, knowing that Michael, like a young beauty swept out of a small Nebraska town by some Hollywood Daddy-O, was soon to leave our midst for headier airs, never to return.
Mom called. Dad stuff — after not sleeping all night again, he dressed for work and then went into the garage once more to work on his model trains. When she tries to talk about the firing, he gets all jolly and brushes it away, saying the future’s just going to be fine. But he has no details. No pictures of what comes next.
Dad called. From his den. He wanted to know what the employment situation was like at Microsoft for someone like him. I couldn’t believe it. So now I’m worried about him. He should know better. I guess it’s shock.
I told him to relax, to not even try to think about doing anything for at least a few more days until the shock wears off. He acted all hurt, as if I was trying to get rid of him. He wasn’t himself. I tried to tell him what Karla had told me, about fiftysomethings now just entering the ease-of-use curve with new technologies, but he wouldn’t listen. It ended on a bad note, and this bugged me, but I didn’t know one other practical thing I could say.
