Douglas Coupland - Microserfs

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Note: There are many sections of text in this book that may look like nonsense or garbage if you haven't

read the hard copy. They're original text. Some of these are supposed to be a computer's "subconscious

files''; in some instances Finereader broke them into blocks and read them in the wrong order, and I let

them be. Figured it was only fair.

I have only omitted the instances where Coupland does something like fill two entire pages with nothing

but the word 'machine.'

Microserfs

ByDouglas Coupland

Microserfs

FRIDAY

Early Fall, 1993

This morning, just after 11:00, Michael locked himself in his office and he won't come out.

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Bill (Bill!) sent Michael this totally wicked flame-mail from hell on the e-mail system-and he just wailed

on a chunk of code Michael had written. Using theBloom County -cartoons-taped-on-the-door index,

Michael is certainly the most sensitive coder in Building Seven-not the type to take criticism easily.

Exactly why Bill would choose Michael of all people to wail on is confusing.

We figured it must have been a random quality check to keep the troops in line. Bill's so smart.

Bill is wise.

Bill is kind.

Bill is benevolent.

Bill, Be My Friend . . .Please!

Actually, nobody on our floor has ever been flamed by Bill personally. The episode was tinged with

glamour and we were somewhat jealous. I tried to tell Michael this, but he was crushed.

Shortly before lunch he stood like a lump outside my office. His skin was pale like rising bread dough,

and his Toppy's cut was dripping sweat,

leaving little damp marks on the oyster-gray-with-plum highlights of the Microsoft carpeting. He handed

me a printout of Bill's memo and then gallumphed into his office, where he's been burrowed ever since.

He won't answer his phone, respond to e-mail, or open his door. On his doorknob he placed a "Do Not

Disturb" thingy stolen from the Boston Radisson during last year's Macworld Expo. Todd and I walked

out onto the side lawn to try to peek in his window, but his Venetian blinds were closed and a gardener

with a leaf blower chased us away with a spray of grass clippings.

They mow the lawn every ten minutes at Microsoft. It looks like green Lego pads.

Finally, at about 2:30 a.m., Todd and I got concerned about Michael's not eating, so we drove to the

24-hour Safeway in Bellevue. We went shopping for "flat" foods to slip underneath Michael's door.

The Safeway was completely empty save for us and a few other Microsoft people just like

us-hair-trigger geeks in pursuit of just the right snack. Because of all the rich nerds living around here,

Redmond and Bellevue are very "on-demand" neighborhoods. Nerds get what they want when they want

it, and they go psycho if it's not immediately available. Nerds overfocus. I guess that's the problem. But

it's precisely this ability to narrow-focus that makes them so good at code writing: one line at a time, one

line in a strand of millions.

When we returned to Building Seven at 3:00 a.m., there were still a few people grinding away. Our

group is scheduled to ship product (RTM: Release to Manufacturing) in just eleven days (Top Secret:

We'll never make it).

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Michael's office lights were on, but once again, when we knocked, he wouldn't answer his door. We

heard his keyboard chatter, so we figured he was still alive. The situation really begged a discussion of

Turing logic- could we have discerned that the entity behind the door was indeed even human? We slid

Kraft singles, Premium Plus crackers, Pop-Tarts, grape leather, and Freezie-Pops in to him.

Todd asked me, "Do you think any of this violates geek dietary laws?" Just then, Karla in the office

across the hall screamed and then glared out at us from her doorway. Her eyes were all red and sore

behind her round glasses. She said, "You guys are only encouraging him," like we were feeding a raccoon

or something. I don't think Karla ever sleeps.

She harrumphed and slammed her door closed. Doors sure are important to nerds.

Anyway, by this point Todd and I were both really tired. We drove back to the house to crash, each in

our separate cars, through the Campus grounds-22 buildings' worth of nerd-cosseting fun-cloistered by

100-foot-tall second growth timber, its streets quiet as the womb: the foundry of our culture's deepest

dreams.

There was mist floating on the ground above the soccer fields outside the central buildings. I thought

about the e-mail and Bill and all of that, and I had this weird feeling-of how the presence of Bill floats

about the Campus, semi-visible, at all times, kind of like the dead grandfather in theFamily Circus

cartoons. Bill is a moral force, a spectral force, a force that shapes, a force that molds. A force with

thick, thick glasses.

I am danielu@microsoft.com. If my life was a gameof Jeopardy! my seven dream categories would be:

• Tandy products

• Trash TV of the late '70s and early '80s

• The history of Apple

• Career anxieties

• Tabloids

• Plant life of the Pacific Northwest

• Jell-O 1-2-3

I am a tester-a bug checker in Building Seven. I worked my way up the ladder from Product Support

Services (PSS) where I spent six months in phone purgatory in 1991 helping little old ladies format their

Christmas mailing lists on Microsoft Works.

Like most Microsoft employees, I consider myself too well adjusted lo be working here, even though I

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am 26 and my universe consists of home, Microsoft, and Costco.

I am originally from Bellingham, up just near the border, but my parents live in Palo Alto now. I live in a

group house with five other Microsoft employees: Todd, Susan, Bug Barbecue, Michael, and Abe.

We call ourselves "The Channel Three News Team."

I am single. I think partly this is because Microsoft is not conducive to relationships. Last year down at

the Apple Worldwide Developer's Conference in San Jose, I met a girl who works not too far away, at

Hewlett-Packard on Interstate 90, but it never went anywhere. Sometimes I'll sort of get something

going, but then work takes over my life and I bail out of all my commitments and things fizzle.

Lately I've been unable to sleep. That's why I've begun writing this journal late at night, to try to see the

patterns in my life. From this I hope to establish what my problem is-and then, hopefully, solve it. I'm

trying to feel more well adjusted than I really am, which is, I guess, the human condition. My life is lived

day to day, one line of bug-free code at a time.

The house:

Growing up, I used to build split-level ranch-type homes out of Legos. This is pretty much the house I

live in now, but its ambiance is anything but sterilized Lego-clean. It was built about twenty years ago,

maybe before Microsoft was even in the dream stage and this part of Redmond had a lost, alpine

ski-cabin feel.

Instead of a green plastic pad with little plastic nubblies, our house sits on a thickly-treed lot beside a

park on a cul-de-sac at the top of a steep hill. It's only a seven-minute drive from Campus. There are

two other Microsoft group houses just down the hill. Karla, actually, lives in the house three down from

us across the street.

People end up living in group houses either by e-mail or by word of mouth. Living in a group house is a

little bit like admitting you're deficient in the having-a-life department, but at work you spend your entire

life crunching code and testing for bugs, and what else are you supposed to do? Work, sleep, work,

sleep, work, sleep. I know a few Microsoft employees who try to fake having a life-many a Redmond

garage contains a never-used kayak collecting dust. You ask these people what they do in their spare

time and they say,"Uhhh -kayaking. That's right. I kayak in my spare time." You can tell they're faking it.

I don't even do many sports anymore and my relationship with my body has gone all weird. I used to

play soccer three times a week and now I feel like a boss in charge of an underachiever. I feel like my

body is a station wagon in which I drive my brain around, like a suburban mother taking the kids to

hockey practice.

The house is covered with dark cedar paneling. Out front there's a tiny patch of lawn covered in

miniature yellow crop circles thanks to the dietary excesses of our neighbor's German shepherd, Mishka.

Bug Barbecue keeps his weather experiments-funnels and litmus strips and so forth-nailed to the wall

beside the front door. A flat of purple petunias long-expired from neglect- Susan's one attempt at

prettification - depresses us every time we leave for work in the morning, resting as it does in the thin

strip of soil between the driveway and Mishka's crop circles.

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Abe, our in-house multimillionaire, used to have tinfoil all over his bedroom windows to keep out what

few rays of sun penetrated the trees until we ragged on him so hard that he went out and bought a sheaf

of black construction paper at the Pay 'n Save and taped it up instead. It looked like a drifter lived here.

Todd's only contribution to the house's outer appearance is a collection of car-washing toys sometimes

visible beside the garage door. The only evidence of my being in the house is my 1977 AMC Hornet

Sportabout hatchback parked out front when I'm home. It's bright orange, it's rusty, and damnit, it'sugly.

SATURDAY

Shipping hell continued again today. Grind, grind, grind. We'll never make it. Have I said that already?

Why do we always underestimate our shipping schedules? I just don't understand. In at 9:30 a.m.; out at

11:30 p.m. Domino's for dinner. And three diet Cokes.

I got bored a few times today and checked the WinQuote on my screen- that's the extension that gives

continuous updates on Microsoft's NASDAQ price. It was Saturday, and there was never any change,

but I kept forgetting. Habit. Maybe the Tokyo or Hong Kong exchanges might cause a fluctuation?

Most staffers peek at WinQuote a few times a day. I mean, if you have 10,000 shares (and tons of staff

members have way more) and the stock goes up a buck, you've just made ten grand! But then, if it goes

down two dollars, you've just lost twenty grand. It's a real psychic yo-yo. Last April Fool's Day,

someone fluctuated the price up and down by fifty dollars and half the staff had coronaries.

Because I started out low on the food chain and worked my way up, I didn't get much stock offered to

me the way that programmers and systems designers get stock firehosed onto them when they start.

What stock I do own won't fully vest for another 2.5 years (stock takes 4.5 years to fully vest).

Susan's stock vests later this week, and she's going to have a vesting party. And then she's going to quit.

Larger social forces are at work, threatening to dissolve our group house.

The stock closed up $1.75 on Friday. Bill has 78,000,000 shares, so that means he's now $136.5

million richer. I have almost no stock, and this means I am a loser.

News update: Michael is now out of his office. It's as if he never had his geek episode. He slept there

throughout the whole day (not unusual at Microsoft), using hisJurassic Park inflatable T-Rex toy as a

pillow. When he woke up in the early evening, he thanked me for bringing him the Kraft products, and

now he says he won't eat anything that's not entirely two-dimensional. "Ich bin ein Flatlander," he piped,

as he cheerfully sifted through hard copy of the bug-checked code he'd been chugging out. Karla made

disgusted clicking noises with her tongue from her office. I think maybe she's in love with Michael.

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More details about our group house-Our House of Wayward Mobility.

Because the house receives almost no sun, moss and algae tend to colonize what surfaces they can.

There is a cherry tree crippled by a fungus. The rear verandah, built of untreated 2x4's, has quietly rotted

away, and the sliding door in the kitchen has been braced shut with a hockey stick to prevent the unwary

from straying into the suburban abyss.

The driveway contains six cars: Todd's cherry-red Supra (his life, what little there is of it), my pumpkin

Hornet, and four personality-free gray Microsoftmobiles-a Lexus, an Acura Legend, and two Tauri (nerd

plural for Taurus). I bet if Bill drove a Shriner's go-cart to work, everybody else would, too.

Inside, each of us has a bedroom. Because of the McDonald's-like turnover in the house, the public

rooms-the living room, kitchen, dining room, and basement-are bleak, to say the least. The dormlike

atmosphere precludes heavy-duty interior design ideas. In the living room are two velveteen sofas that

were too big and too ugly for some long-gone tenants to lake with them. Littered about the Tiki green

shag carpet are:

• Two Microsoft Works PC inflatable beach cushions

• One Mitsubishi 27-inch color TV

• Various vitamin bottles

• Several weight-gaining system cartons (mine)

• 86 copies ofMacWEEK arranged in chronological order by Bug Barbecue, who will go berserk if you

so much as move one issue out of dale

• Six Microsoft Project 2.0 juggling bean bags

• Bone-shaped chew toys for when Mishka visits

• Two PowerBooks

• Three IKEA mugs encrusted with last month's blender drink sensation

• Two 12.5-pound dumbbells (Susan's)

• A Windows NT box

• Three baseball caps (two Mariners, one A's)

• Abe's Battlestar Galactica trading card album

• Todd's pile of books on how to change your life to win!(Getting Past OK, 7 Habits of Highly

Effective People . . .)

The kitchen is stocked with ramshackle 1970s avocado green appliances. You can almost hear the

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ghost of Emily Hartley yelling "Hi, Bob!" every time you open the fridge door (a sea of magnets and

4-x-6-inch photos of last year's house parties).

Our mail is in little piles by the front door: bills, Star Trek junk mail, and the heap-o-catalogues next to

the phone.

I think we'd order our lives via 1-800 numbers if we could.

Mom phoned from Palo Alto. This is the time of year she calls a lot. She calls because she wants to

speak about Jed, but none of us in the family are able. We kind of erased him.

I used to have a younger brother named Jed. He drowned in a boating accident in the Strait of Juan de

Fuca when I was 14 and he was 12. A Labor Day statistic.

To this day, anything Labor Day-ish creeps me out: the smell of barbecuing salmon, life preservers,

Interstate traffic reports from the local radio Traffic Copter, Monday holidays. But here's a secret: My

e-mail password ishellojed. So I think about him every day. He was way better with computers than I

was. He was way nerdier than me.

As it turned out, Mom had good news today. Dad has a big meeting Monday with his company. Mom

and Dad figure it's a promotion because Dad's IBM division has been doing so well (by IBM

standards-it's not hemorrhaging money). She says she'll keep me posted.

Susan taped laser-printed notes on all of our bedroom doors reminding us about the

vesting party this Thursday ("Vest Fest '93"), which was a subliminal hint to us to clean up the place.

Most of us work in Building Seven; shipping hell has brought a severe breakdown in cleanup codes.

Susan is 26 and works in Mac Applications. If Susan were aJeopardy! contestant, her dream board

would be:

• 680X0 assembly language

•Cats

• Early '80s haircut bands

• "My secret affair with Rob in the Excel Group"

• License plate slogans of America

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• Plot lines fromThe Monkees

•The death of IBM

Susan's an IBM brat and hates that company with a passion. She credits it with ruining her youth by

transferring her family eight times before she graduated from high school-and the punchline is that the

company gave her father the boot last year during a wave of restructuring. So nothing too evil can happen

to IBM in her eyes. Her graphic designer friend made up T-shirts saying "IBM: Weak as a Kitten, Dumb

as a Sack of Hammers." We all wear them. I gave one to Dad last Christmas but his reaction didn't score

too high on the chuckle-o-meter. (I am not an IBM brat-Dad was teaching at the University of Western

Washington until the siren of industry lured him to Palo Alto in 1985. It was very '80s.)

Susan's a real coding machine. But her abilities are totally wasted reworking old code for something like

the Norwegian Macintosh version of Word 5.8. Susan's work ethic best sums up the ethic of most of the

people I've met who work at Microsoft. If I recall her philosophy from the conversation she had with her

younger sister two weekends ago, it goes something like this:

"It's never been, 'We're doing this for the good of society.' It's always been us taking an intellectual pride

in putting out a good product-and making money. If putting a computer on every desktop and in every

home didn't make money, we wouldn't do it."

That sums up most of the Microsoft people I know.

Microsoft, like any office, is a status theme park. Here's a quick rundown:

• Profitable projects are galactically higher in status than loser (not quite as profitable) projects.

• Microsoft at Work (Digital Office) is sexiest at the moment. Fortune 500 companies are drooling over

DO because it'll allow them to downsize

millions of employees. Basically, DO allows you to operate your fax, phone, copier-all of your office

stuff-from your PC.

• Cash cows like Word are profitable but not really considered cutting

edge.

• Working on-Campus is higher status than being relegated to one of the

off-Campus Siberias.

• Having Pentium-driven hardware (built to the hilt) in your office is higher status than having 486

droneware.

• Having technical knowledge is way up there.

• Being an architect is also way up there.

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• Having Bill-o-centric contacts is way, way up there.

• Shipping your product on time is maybe the coolest (insert wave of anxiety here). If you ship on time

you get a Ship-It award: a 12-x-15-x-l-inch Lucite slab-but you have to pretend it's no big deal. Michael

has a Ship-It award and we've tried various times to destroy it-blowtorching, throwing it off the

verandah, dousing it with acetone to dissolve it-nothing works. It's so permanent, it's frightening.

More roommate profiles:

First, Abe. If Abe were aJeopardy! contestant, his seven dream categories would be:

• Intel assembly language

• Bulk shopping

•C++

• Introversion

• "I love my aquarium"

• How to have millions of dollars and not let it affect your life in any way

• Unclean laundry

Abe is sort of like the household Monopoly-game banker. He collects our monthly checks for the

landlord, $235 apiece. The man has millions and he rents! He's been at the group house since 1984,

when he was hired fresh out of MIT. (The rest of us have been here, on average, about eight months

apiece.) After ten years of writing code, Abe so far shows no signs of getting a life. He seems happy to

be reaching the age of 30 in just four months with nothing to his name but a variety of neat-o consumer

electronics and boxes of Costco products purchased in rash moments of Costco-scale madness ("Ten

thousand straws! Just think of it-only $10 and I'll never need to buy straws ever again!") These products

line the walls of his room, giving it the feel of an air-raid shelter.

Bonus detail: There are dried-out patches of sneeze spray all over Abe's monitors. You'd think he could

afford 24 bottles of Windex.

Next, Todd. Todd's sevenJeopardy! categories would be:

• Your body is your temple

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• Baseball hats

• Meals made from combinations of Costco products

• Psychotically religious parents

• Frequent and empty sex

• SEGA Genesis gaming addiction

• The Supra

Todd works as a tester with me. He's really young-22-the way Microsoft employees all used to be. His

interest is entirely in girls, bug testing, his Supra, and his body, which he buffs religiously at the Pro Club

gym and feeds with peanut butter quesadillas, bananas, and protein drinks.

Todd is historically empty. He neither knows nor cares about the past. He readsCar and Driver and

fields three phone calls a week from his parents who believe that computers are "the Devil's voice box,"

and who try to persuade him to return home to Port Angeles and speak with the youth pastor.

Todd's the most fun of all the house members because he is all impulse and no consideration. He's also

the only roomie to have clean laundry consistently. In a crunch you can always borrow an unsoiled shirt

from Todd.

Bug Barbecue's sevenJeopardy! categories would be:

• Bitterness

• Xerox PARC nostalgia

• Macintosh products

• More bitterness

• Psychotic loser friends

• Jazz

• Still more bitterness

Bug Barbecue is the World's Most Bitter Man. He is (as his name implies) a tester with me at Building

Seven. His have-a-life factor is pretty near zero. He has the smallest, darkest room in the house, in which

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Note:Therearemanysectionsoftextinthisbookthatmaylooklikenonsenseorgarbageifyouhaven'treadthehardcopy.They'reoriginaltext.Someofthesearesupposedtobeacomputer's"subconsciousfiles'';insomeinstancesFinereaderbrokethemintoblocksandreadtheminthewrongorder,andIletthembe.Figureditwasonlyfair.Ihaveonlyomitt...

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