Douglas Coupland - Microserfs

• 680×0 assembly language

• Cats

• Early ‘80s haircut bands

• “My secret affair with Rob in the Excel Group”

• License plate slogans of America

• Plot lines from The 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 Western Washington University 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 drone ware.

• Having technical knowledge is way up there.

• Being an architect is also way up there.

• 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 a product you get a Ship-It award: a 12-x-15-x-1-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, dowsing it with acetone to dissolve it — nothing works. It’s so permanent, it’s frightening.

More roommate profiles:

First, Abe. If Abe were a Jeopardy! 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 seven Jeopardy! categories would be:

• Your body is your temple

• 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 reads Car 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 seven Jeopardy! 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 he maintains two small shrines: one to his Sinclair ZX-81, his first computer, and the other to supermodel Elle MacPherson. Man, she’d freak if she saw the hundreds of little photos — the coins, the candles, the little notes.

Bug is 31, and he lets everyone know it. If we ever ask him so much as “Hey, Bug — have you seen volume 7 of my Inside Mac?” he gives a sneer and replies, “You’re obviously of the generation that never built their own motherboard or had to invent their own language.”

Hey, Bug — we love you, too.

Bug never gets offered stock by the company. When payday comes and the little white stock option envelopes with red printing reading “Personal and Confidential” end up in all of our pigeonholes, Bug’s is always, alas, empty. Maybe they’re trying to get rid of him, but it’s almost impossible to fire someone at Microsoft. It must drive the administration nuts. They hired 3,100 people in 1992 alone, and you know not all of them were gems.

Oddly, Bug is fanatical in his devotion to Microsoft. It’s as if the more they ignore him, the more rabidly he defends their honor. And if you cherish your own personal time, you will not get into a discussion with him over the famous Look-&-Feel lawsuit or any of the FTC or Department of Justice actions:

“These litigious pricks piss me off. I wish they’d compete in the marketplace where it really counts instead of being little wusses and whining for government assistance to compete….”

You’ve been warned.

Finally, Michael. Michael’s seven Jeopardy! categories would be:

• FORTRAN

• Pascal

• Ada (defense contracting code)

• LISP

• Neil Peart (drummer for Rush)