Дуглас Коупленд - Microserfs

Susan likened the Stalinist purges to those at IBM.

"Finally, there's Maoism. Maoism is about the total elimination of all culture. Anything that smacks of culture is bad. Everything from cocktail umbrellas up to Mozart. It all has to go."

I said, "That's dreadful, Todd – culture is everything. Without culture we're nothing. You're telling me you'd have all existing Bob Newhart reruns destroyed!"

"Bob Newhart romanticizes decadent, self-absorbed bourgeois liberal therapeutic culture. It is redeemable only in that therapy repudiates the Church."

"Sounds like a pretty chuckle-free universe to me," said Karla.

"More to life than chuckles, Kar," said Todd, frappeing a can of Del Monte pineapple and some form of protein powder in the office blender. "It's obvious – culture must perish."

"Why?" I asked.

"I'm not sure. Just that it must. I'm working on that one. Oh look – there's Dusty down on the street – we're off to our posing seminar. Gold's just had new daises delivered. Ciao, comrades."

Glurp. Guzzle. Chug. Slam.

"Be sure and flex one for me."

"Can't those two just code?" moaned Michael in a rare show of feeling. So now the Gang of Two (Boris and Natasha no more) are onto their next political kick.

Abe:

Went into Microsoft. Spent most of the morning entering my old vynyl records into a database Iv'e built. Filemaker Prod by Claris gets to Track my CHS tape collection..

Questions: Can you gusess what this is by the ingeredients?

SD Alcohol

LVater

Tween 20

Glycerine

Flavor

Sodium Sacchharine

FD&CBlueNQI

"Made in USA"

Keep guessing. I'll give you the answer later. [Answer: ice Drops icy-mint breath freshener.]

Dusty was telling us later on all of this cool body stuff: about an aerobic drug, RPO, that enhances the body's ability to metabolize oxygen. Rumor has it a French bicycling team all died of heart attacks using it. And she discussed how too many steroids make women grow hair and can make users "acromegliac" – their craniums distort.

Oh – Dusty barfed up whole Lake Superiors of muck all morning. I wonder what's up with that.

Some new diet regime, doubtless.

Ethan says Type-A personalities have a whole subset of diseases that they, and only they, share, and the transmission vector for these diseases is the door close button on elevators that only get pushed by impatient, Type-A people. Ethan pushes these buttons with his elbow, now. I'm starting lo worry about all of us.

In the spirit of Ethan's neurosis, we made a dry wall list of keyboard bill tons we would like to see:

PLEASE

THANK YOU

FUCK OFF

DIE

OOPS ... MYMISTAKE

DO SOMETHING COOL AND SURPRISE ME

Later, everyone got in a debate over whether or not Fisher Price's minifigs were cooler than Lego's. The debate went onto the drywall:

FISHER PRICE minifigs versus LEGO minifigs

Fisher Price Minifigs:

Plus: limbless figures give children a feeling of helplessness

Minus: faces resemble those of beloved but unfunny cartoon characters in Family Circus

Plus: generic, Gap-like outfits

Minus: height/weight-disproportionate bodies imply eating disorders: bad role model for millennial youth yearning to be functional

Lego Minifigs:

Plus: interchangeable, unisex hairdos

Minus: clawlike hands are scary and potentially traumatizing

Plus: bodies can be incorporated into architecture

Minus: bad fashions

Dad hates his boss, "the 32-year-old prick."

"He's a humorless Total Quality Management freak who uses Anthony Robbins pep talks to motivate me into learning humiliatingly simple input codes. Hell, I'm younger than him in everything but body."

Dad's only one-third the way up the food chain in his division at Delta, and it must be really degrading for him. Mom said, "I know your father wanted a job badly, but maybe this isn't his cup of tea. Can't you people teach him C++ a bit faster?" We had to tell her that learning doesn't scale. But the idea of Dad being a hip and with-it coder is one that appeals to all of us in the office. Who knows where this will lead.

Dad quit his job. He showed up at the office around two in the afternoon to tell me. Michael promptly gave him some C++ manuals and put him in an empty chair in the corner and said, "Time to learn for real, Mr. Underhill."

Mom was P-I-S-S-E-D off. But even still, she knew the Delta thing was going nowhere. She figures Dad's just caught in this weird demographic glitch: too young to retire; too old to learn new tricks. She figures Dad's around for the long haul, so she told Dad two new rules she's made up for day-to-day living:

1) I'm never making you lunch.

2) You're never allowed to come shopping with me.

Other changes: the Gang of Two traipsed in this morning. "We have ceased being Maoists. We are now ideologically basing ourselves on Product Theory."

Being numb from all of their flip-flop – and from extreme politics in general – once again nobody bothered to look up. "Gee kids, that's nice. See Star Trek last night?"

Todd added, "The modern economy isn't about the redistribution of wealth – it's about the redistribution of time."

His eyeballs were rolling inside his head with pleasure. "Instead of battling to control rubber boot factories, the modern post-Maoist wants to battle for your 45 minutes of daily discretionary time. The consumer electronics industry is all about lassoing your time, not your money – that time-greedy ego-part of the brain that wants to maximize a year's worth of year."

"But that," I said, "is exactly what Ethan believes."

Silence.

Ethan shot me a self-satisfied glance, and the ex-Gang of Two went to work without much ado.

"Really," said Michael, "I hope this here is the end of politics."

Karla said to me later on, "Did you know that Michael spends one hour a day on e-mail talking to someone named BarCode who lives in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada? Has he ever mentioned this to you?"

"Michael discussed his interior life?"

Todd overheard and added, "You know, if I read one more article about cybersex I am going to explode," to which Dusty said, "Now, Toddy, if you shoot one more vial of 'roids you will explode." Which shut him up.

But Todd's right. The media has gone berserk with Net-this and Net-that. It's a bit much. The Net is cool, but not that cool.

I thanked Michael for being nice to my Dad, letting him hang around the office and that kind of stuff, but Michael said, "Nice? I suppose so. But once he gets the basics down, he'll make an excellent representative for Oop!, don't you think? All that silver hair, and best of all, no dandruff."

Two pounds of solid rippling muscle gained this week! Maybe. It could have been my extended visit to the water fountain before the weigh – in that tilted the scales upward.

I had to drop off some diskettes at Todd and Dusty's tonight. I walked up to the house and through the main window I could see Todd slathering Dusty with barbecue-tinted goo as she was standing on a posing dais in front of a full-length mirror, happy as a clam. He was brushing Dusty's tummy; I peeked through the bougainvillea, thought twice about interrupting their ritual, and drove into the flower-scented, gasoline-powered California night.