Дуглас Коупленд - Microserfs

Todd instant-mailed me, Women have *chunky* days? Are guys supposed to know this stuff? I am experiencing fear.

I was trying to think of a "guy" equivalent of chunkiness, but I couldn't, and meanwhile, the three of them just kept rocking on, and Todd, Bug, and I just buried our heads deeper into our work areas.

Dusty said, "Gawd ... I was rilly, rilly freaked out the first time I had chunks. No one ever tells you about that in, like, school or at home or anything. You see those Playtex commercials and they've got this watery blue liquid and that's what you're expecting, and then one day you look at your pad and there are ... chunks there. Grotacious."

Karla, ever logical, said, "I knew intellectually it had to be uterine lining, but I envisioned the lining as being thin, wispy ... not like chunks of liver."

Dusty figured, "We, as women, also need to invent some alternative to that adhesive they use on pads. I wouldn't even wear them if it weren't for chunks. It rilly bothers me to think of these chunks that want to migrate south, but they can't because of this Tampon Roadblock. So I always wear pads on like the second day, but I hate them. It's like getting a drive-by waxing."

Karla suggested, "If they ever made 'chunky-style' tampons, we wouldn't need to ever wear pads."

Susan said, "I'll bet you anything Fry's doesn't carry tampons because they're misogynist and afraid of adult, bleeding women ... they can't accept the non-Barbie, fully-functional female!"

Karla and Dusty: "Right on, Sister!"

Susan said, "Yet again men win: with condom hysteria and semen they monopolize the notion of sacred body fluids. Women lose again. I want pads to be to the 1990s what condoms were to the 1980s. Destigmatize the flow!"

Susan had the idea to start up a support group for Valley women who code. She's calling it Chyx and has put word out on the Net. She said, "I was going to spell it 'Chycks' but then 'Chyx' sounds more like a bioengineering firm, and that's kind of cool."

Prerequisites for joining Chyx (which makes you a "Chyk") are "fluency in two or more computer languages, a vagina, and a belief that Mary Tyler Moore as Mary Richards in a slinky pantsuit is the worldly embodiment of God."

Susan will probably be swamped. Karla and Dusty have Chyx member numbers 0002 and 0003 respectively. They have been given a full set of photocopied writings of Brenda Laurel.

This reminds me, the lower your employee number down here, the higher your status – and the more likely you are to hold equity.

Later on in the day, our lives devolved into an Itchy&Scratchy cartoon. We all decided we needed sunlight – we've all been working so hard lately and our internal clocks are somewhere in the Eastern Bloc nations – so we went for a drive in the Microbus up through Stanford, up to the linear particle accelerator that passes underneath the 280 by the Sand Hill Road exit.

It was the core team from the old Redmond geek house: Karla, Michael, Todd, Bug, and Susan – as well as Ethan. Dusty didn't come because everything makes her sick these days. She's set her workstation up by the bathroom door. She craves instant "Mr., Noodles," and is constantly sending Todd out for food runs to Burger King. Michael gave her his collection of international airline sickness bags as a "fertilization present."

Emmett left early, no doubt to groom himself. Anatole came by, but left. We're mad at him because he still hasn't organized an Apple tour for us, and he said he would, weeks ago.

Anyway, Bug and Susan and Todd and Ethan got in this arcane discussion on the relative merits of QWERTY versus Dvorak keyboards and it got U-G-L-Y. They were screaming, and I swear, the four of them were going to strangle each other with seat belts and burn each other's eyes out with the cigarette lighter and drag each other raw on the pavement, making sick red smudges along the neat and clean California State white lines.

Finally I booted them out at Pasteur and Sand Hill Drive, then drove a quarter mile up, letting them feel stupid and walk it off. I screamed out the window, "Stop the madness!"

Anyway, after "our coders" had their little walk, they were much better behaved. Then Todd yelled "Shogun," not "shotgun," to claim the front passenger seat, but then Susan said only the word "shotgun" counted, and it turned all Itchy&Scratchy again, and Bug ended up nabbing the shotgun seat.

We drove to the Sand Hill Road exit (location of the dreaded venture capital mall) west off the 280, into the paddocks and oaks and horsey area, parked the bus, and walked across a Christmas tree farm to a Cyclone fence surrounding the Stanford Linear Accelerator, a structure that resembles a mile-long rear side of a 7-Eleven – sandstone-tinted aluminum siding with tasteful landscaping. Not much to look at, but let me say, extremity of shape certainly does imply extremity of function. And whenever you see no windows, there's something scary or beguiling going on inside. No humans. Stepford.

Needless to say, there were fuck off and die warning signs from the Department of Energy bolted onto the wire fencing around the accelerator's perimeter. Ethan said, "Why is it that everything I'm truly interested in has the words 'Warning: U.S. Department of Energy' stamped all over it?"

Today was one of those anything's-possible days: blue skies and fluffy clouds; smooth-flowing freeways; all plant life on 24-hour chlorophyll shift after three days of rain. So alive! Two Cooper's hawks circled in the winds above, wings immobile for ten minutes on end (we timed, of course) hunting mice and gophers and squirrels. Serene.

And then we went into the mountains, into the greenery, so dense, with the sun dappling through, walking across a small wooden bridge and we had to remind ourselves we weren't dead and not in heaven. We came away from it feeling that life really is good, and with our circadian rhythms somewhat restored to Pacific Standard Time.

On the way back we drove past Xerox PARC on Coyote Hill Road, and Bug swooned only mildly. He now no longer foams when he imagines how Xerox could be the biggest company on Earth if they'd only understood what they had back in the 1970s.

After that, we pulled into the Stanford Shopping Center mall to cool off and shop for short pants. Amid the Neiman Marcus, the Williams and Sonoma, the NordicTrack, and the Crabtree&Evelyn franchises we discussed subatomic particles. At Stanford Laboratory they're hunting down the magic particles that hold together the universe. There's one particle that's still unfound. I asked the carload if anyone knew what it was.

"The Top Quark," answered Michael.

"Duct tape," answered Susan, scowling at Todd.

Stanford is so weird. They have bumper stickers like:

"I * ANTARCTICA," "I * Cellos," and "Calligraphy V for letter or verse."

The day taught us one thing: We all agreed we need to take a bit more time out for personal development and simple rest. Even Ethan conceded this necessity, albeit by asking us if we could take shifts to do it. We had to tell him that leisure, like intelligence, doesn't scale.

Everyone immediately bailed out of work, but I headed to the office to play with Oop! for a while to work on my space station. Karla drove up to San Francisco to help Laura from Interval paint her apartment the same color yellow as Mary Tyler Moore's Mustang convertible. Bug was going to go help, too.

Around 1:30 a.m. the door opened and I thought it was Karla, but it was Bug, saying Karla and Laura had gone out for a stag night after they ran out of paint.

Bug came in and sat down in the chair next to me and we had a conversation. The lights were low – just a few monitors and a light by the coffee machine. Bug said – not even to me, I think, but to himself, "I was just in this nightclub downtown, Dan. I felt awkward. I'm not used to nightclubs and I don't like cigarette smoke or the way people pose and get phony in clubs."