Дуглас Коупленд - Microserfs

Personal Computer

I am your personal computer

Hello

Stop

Being

Carbon

CNN

LensCrafters magnetic ID card instant noodles dodecahedron

Lawry's Garlic Salt

666

airbag

employee number birthATM

808 Honolulu 503 Klamath Falls 604 Victoria

oatmeal

cherry flavored antacids

holodeck

Sierra

NCC-1701

Schroder Wagg/London

702 Las Vegas 206Tacoma 916 Shasta

laxatives Rubbermaid Courtyard Marriott Big Gulp liquid money Rank Xerox

Todd and I tied our "Ship-It" awards to a rope behind my AMC Hornet Sportabout hatchback wagon and dragged them for an hour around the suburbs of Bellevue and Redmond.

Net result: a few little nicks and scratches. They are awesomely indestructible.

I try to imagine someone or some new species in fifty million years, unearthing one of these profoundly unbiodegradable little gems and trying lo deduce something meaningful about the species and culture that created it.

"Surely they lived not for the moment but for some distant time – obviously a time far, far beyond their own era, to have created such an astounding artifact that would not decay."

"Yes, Yeltar, and they inscribed profound, meaningful, and transcendent text inside this miraculously preserved clear block, but alas, its message remains forever cryptic:"

EVERY TIME A PRODUCT SHIPS,

IT TAKES US ONE STEP CLOSER TO THE VISION:

A COMPUTER ON EVERY DESK AND IN EVERY HOME.

Dad phoned to ask me how to hook up a modem. He's joining the Net now. For three days last month he ended up on the green velveteen living room couch, sleeping endlessly. Or else he'd come sit with me in my office while we finished debugging for shipping. He seemed to like that. But he was so f ra gile , and when Karla and I drove him out to SeaTac airport he sat in the backseat, rattling like a stack of Franklin Mint souvenir plates.

Mom keeps sending me clippings about the information superhighway and interactive multimedia. She clips things out of the San Jose Mercury News (her librarian's heart). This highway – is it a joke? You hear so much about it, but really, what is it ... slide shows with music? Suddenly it's all over the place. EVERYWHERE.

Morris e'd me back from Amsterdam:

l tried one and they're not very good, so don't romanticize them. They have a curry taste, and they're full of frozen *peas* (of all things). More importantly, by eating "burgers", aren't you just still buying into the "meat concept." Tofu hot dogs are merely an isotope of meat. lf you yourself are a vegetarian, but still dream of burgers, then all you really are is a cryptocarnivore.

Went to Nordstrom's. Watched Wings on A&E.

Bug sulks in his room all day, listening to Chet Baker, restoring his antique Radio Shack Science Fair 65-In-One electronic project kit, and memorizing C++ syntax. Susan house hunts. Todd lives at the Pro Club gym. Abe has been reassigned to a subgroup in charge of designing a toolbar interface. Whooo-ee!

I think Abe's being punished for going sailing that day with his friends during the week we were all in crunch mode. We don't see him much – he's back in Microsoft time/space again. He gets home late, feeds his neon tetras sprinkles of ground-up, freeze-dried poor people, chides us all for not exhibiting more enterprise, and then sleeps.

2:45 a.m. Drove into Seattle tonight with Todd in separate cars. Todd scored at The Crocodile and at the moment he and his "date", Tabitha from Tukwilla, are in his room getting acquainted.

Bug is here in the living room watching "Casper the Friendly Ghost" cartoons on the VCR, "looking for subtext". I can't believe it, but I'm getting into it, too. ("Wait, Bug – rewind that back a few seconds – wasn't that a Masonic compass?") Karla was asleep ages ago. She stayed home and watched The Thornbirds on the VCR with Susan. ("It's a girl thing. Scram.") Karla has an unsuspected fathomless capacity for sleep of which I am most envious.

Continued adding to my computer's subconscious files.

Welcome to Macintosh

Carl's Jr.

Gore-Tex®

gray metallic Saabs

Barry Diller KISS

mini-bars ads for pearls outer space

manufacture dungeons

magazine scent strips

BellAtlantic

phone jacks

F-16

Calvin Klein

bourgeois decay images

Upload

Sparkletts

frequent flyer points Oscar de la Renta minimum wage

flame broiled

switchbox

the DMV

MiG-29

Han Solo

Download

Drive

Tori Spelling

Advil

RosslynYou jerk

Kotex

Langley

Lee Press-ons

I went to the library and looked up books on freeway construction – the asphalt and cement kind – Dewey Decimal number 625.79 – and there haven't been any published on the subject for two decades! It's bizarre – like a murder mystery. It's as if the notion of freeway construction simply vanished in 1975. Sizzler titles include:

Bituminous Materials in Road Construction

Surface Texture Versus Skidding

Engineering Study: Alaska Highway

Better Concrete Pavement Serviceability

Vehicle Redirection Effectiveness of Median Berms and Circles

Actually, there weren't all too many books on freeways ever published in the first place. You'd think we'd have whole stadiums devoted to the worship of freeways for the amount of importance they play in our culture, but no. Zip. I guess we're overcompensating for this past shortcoming by our current overhyping of the InfoBahn – the I-way. It's emerged from nowhere into this big important thing we Have to Know About.

I have borrowed, among others, the seminal work on the subject: Handbook of Highway Engineering (1975), by Robert F. Baker, editor; Van Nostrand and Reinhold Company. It'll help melt away my lax days before I join a new product group.

We ripped away some wallpaper in the kitchen by the fridge and found that underneath the various stratum of paper (daisies; Peel n' Stick pepper-mills), in condition just as fresh as the day they were written, the words:

one mellow day

June 6, 1974

I'm long gone but my idea of peace now remains with you

d.b.

Hippie stuff, but I lost my breath when I read the words. And I felt like for a moment that maybe an idea is more important than simply being alive, because an idea lives a long time after you're gone. And then the feeling passed. And we found all of these old, early 1970s Seattle newspapers behind a wallboard. The prices back then ... cheap!

At the Bellevue Starbucks, Karla and I discussed the unprecedented success of Campbell's Cream of Broccoli Soup. On a napkin we listed ideas for new Campbell's soup flavors: