Дуглас Коупленд: Microserfs

I asked her what she meant, and she said, "I mean that the animals live in another sense of time. They can never have a sense of history because they can never see the difference between today and tomorrow."

I juggled some small rocks I found beside me. She said she didn't know I could juggle and I told her it was something I learned by osmosis in my last product group.

We got up and walked together back to Building Seven. I pushed my bike. We walked over the winding white cement path speckled with crow shit, past the fountains, and through the hemlocks and firs.

Things seem different between us now, as if we've somehow agreed to agree. And God, she's skinny! I think I'm going to bring her snacks to eat tomorrow while she works.

I hope this isn't like feeding a raccoon.

Worked until just past midnight and came back home. Had a shower. Three bowls of Corn Flakes and ESPN. My weekends are no different than my weekdays. One of these days I'm going to vanish up to someplace beautiful like Whidbey Island and just veg for two solid days.

Todd is compressing code this week and as a sideline invented what he calls a "Prince Emulator"-a program th@ converts whatever you write into a title of a song by Minnesotan Funkmeister, Prince. I sampled it using part of today's diary:

A few minutz 18r I bumpd in2 Karla walkng akros the west lawn. She walkz rEly kwikly & she'z so smal, like a litl kid.

It wuz so odd 4 both uv us, C-ng Ech uthr outside the otmeel walz + oystr karpetng uv the ofiss. We stopd & s@ on the lawn + talkd 4 a wile. We shared a fElng uv konspiraC by not B-ng inside helpng with the shippng dedline.

I askd hr if she wuz lookng 4 shroomz with the Dedhedz, but she sed she wuz going nutz in hr ofiss, & she just had 2 B in the wild 4 a few minutz in the 4St B-side the Kampus. I thot this wuz such an unuzual aspekt uv hr prsonaliT, I mEn, B-kuz she'z so mowsy + indorzy lookng. It wuz good 2 C hr & 4 once 2 not hav hr yellng @ me 2 stop B-ng a noosanss. We'v wrkd mayB 10 officz apart 4 half a yEr, + we'v nevr once rEly talkd 2 Ech uthr.

I showd Karla sum brch bark I'd pEld off a trE outside Bildng 9 & she showd me sum skarlet soomak lEvz she had found in the 4St. I told hr about the diskussion MarT, AntonLa, Harold, + I had B-n havng about dogz & kat/ ovr @ Nin-10-do'z staf piknik tablz. She 1A down on the ground + Ihol about this, so 11A down, 2. The sun wuz hot & good. I kould only C the sky + hear hr wrdz. She srprizd me.

She sed th@ we, az humnz, bear the brdn uv havng 2 B evry animl in the wrld rold in2 1.

She sed th@ we rEly hav no identiT uv our own.

She sed, "Wh@ iz human B-havior, X-ept tryng 2 proov th@ w'r not animalz?"

She sed, "I think we hav strAd so far awA from our animal originz th@ we R bent on kreSng a noo, soopra-animal idNtiT."

She sed, "Wh@ R komputrz but the EvryAnimalMashEn?"

I kouldn't B-lEv she wuz talkng like this. She wuz like an episode uv Star Trek made flesh. It wuz az if I wuz falng in2 a dEp, dEp hole az I hrd hr voiss speak 2 me. But then a bumbl-B bumbld abuv us & it stole our alOnshun the wA flyng thngz kan.

She sed, "Imagin B-ng a B + livng in a gr8 big hive. You would hav no idea th@ 2morow wuz going 2 B any difrent than 2dA. You kould retrn 2 th@ same hive 1,000 yearz latr & ther would B just the same prception uv 2morow az nevr B-ng any difrent. Humanz R kompletely difrent. We asooin 2morow iz anuthr wrld."

I askd hr wot she ment, + she sed, "I meen th@ the animalz liv in anuthr sens uv time. They kan nevr hav a sens uv history B-kuz they kan nevr C the difrenss B-twEn 2dA & 2morow."

I juggld sum smal rokz I found B-side me. She sed she didnt kno 1 kould juggl + I told hr it wuz sumthing I Irnd by ozmosis in my last produkt groop.

We got up & walkd 2gethr bak 2 Bildng 7. I pushd my bike. We walkcl ovr the windng wite Cment path spekld with krow shit, past the fountun/, + thru the hemlokz & frz.

I reread the Prince Version and realized th@ after a certain point, real language decomposes into encryption code; Japanese.

Dad got fired! Didn't we see that one coming a mile away. This whole restructuring business.

Mom phoned around 11:00 a.m. and she spent only ten minutes giving me the news. She had to get back to Dad, who was out on the back patio, in shock, looking out over Silicon Valley. She said we'll have to talk longer tomorrow. I got off the phone and my head was buzzing.

The results came in from the overnight stress tests – the tests we run to try to locate bugs in the code – and there were five breaks. Five! So I had my work cut out for me today. Nine days until shipping.

Right.

I telephoned Susan over in Mac Applications. The news about Dad was too important for e-mail, and we had lunch together in the big cafeteria in Building Sixteen that resembles the Food Fair at any halfway decent mall Today was Mongolian sticky rice day.

Susan was hardly surprised about IBM dumping Dad. She told me that when she was briefly on the OS/2 version 1.0 team, they sent her to the IBM branch in Boca Raton for two weeks. Apparently IBM was asking people from the data entry department whether they wanted to train to be programmers.

"If they hadn't been doing boneheaded shit like that, your dad would still have a job."

I've been thinking: I get way too many pieces of e-mail, about 60 a day This is a typical number at Microsoft. E-mail is like highways – if you have them, traffic follows.

I'm an e-mail addict. Everybody at Microsoft is an addict. The future of e-mail usage is being pioneered right here. The cool thing with e-mail is that when you send it, there's no possibility of connecting with the person on the other end. It's better than phone answering machines, because with them, the person on the other line might actually pick up the phone and you might have to talk.

Typically, everybody has about a 40 percent immediate cull rate – those pieces of mail you can delete immediately because of a frivolous tag line. What you read of the remaining 60 percent depends on how much of a life you have. The less of a life, the more mail you read.

Abe has developed a "rules-based" software program that anticipates his e-mail preferences and sifts and culls accordingly. I guess that's sort of like Antonella's personal secretary program for cats.

After lunch, I drove down 156th Street to the Uwajima-Ya Japanese supermarket and bought Karla some seaweed and cucumber rolls. They also sell origami paper by the sheet there, so I threw in some cool colored papers as an extra bonus.

When I got back to the office, I knocked on Karla's door and gave her the rolls and the paper. She seemed glad enough to see me (she didn't scowl) and genuinely surprised that I had brought her something.

She asked me to sit in her office. She has a big poster of a MIPS chip blueprint on her wall and some purple and pink flowers in a bud vase, just like Mary Tyler Moore. She said that it was kind of me to bring her a Japanese seaweed roll and everything, but at the moment she was in the middle of a pack of Skittles. Would I like some?

And so we sat and ate Skittles. I told her about my dad and she just listened. And then she told me that her own father operates a small fruit cannery in Oregon. She said that she learned about coding from canning lines – or rather, she developed a fascination for linear logic processes there – and she actually has a degree in manufacturing processes, not computer programming. And she folded one of those origami birds for me. Her IQ must be about 800.

IQs are one of the weird things about Microsoft – you only find the right-hand side of the bell curve on-Campus. There's nobody who's two-digit. Just one more reason it's such a sci-fi place to work.

Anyway, we started talking more about all of the fiftysomethings being dumped out of the economy by downsizing. No one knows what to do with these people, and it's so sad, because being 50 nowadays isn't like being 50 a hundred years ago when you'd probably be dead.