Microserfs (20 page)

I told him about the new word I'd learned, deletia, and Dad laughed.

"That's me!"

We were soon down at El Camino Real. I had to go back to my car. I asked, "Are you guys driving? You need a ride anywhere?"

"We'll walk," said Dad. "But thanks."

"See you back in the Habitrail," said Michael.

Yeah. Right.

Karla was outside the house watering the herb garden with a can when I drove up. I told Karla that it was really unChristmassy of me, but I wanted to kill Michael.

"Michael? What on earth for?"

"He's . . ."

"Yes?"

"He's stealing my father."

"Don't be silly, Dan. It's in your head."

"Dad never talks to me. He's always with Michael. Shit, I don't even know what he does with Michael. They could be selling bomb implosion devices to the Kazakhs for all I know."

"Maybe they've become life-partners," said Karla.

"What?"

"It's a joke, Dan. Calm down. Get a grip on yourself. Listen to yourself. First of all, Michael couldn't shoplift a Nestle's Crunch bar, let alone a parental unit. He's not the type. Has it ever occurred to you they might simply be friends?"

"He knows about Jed. He's trying to be Jed. And I can't compete."

"This is nonsense."

"Didn't I say that about you and your family?"

"But that's different."

"How?"

"Because .. . because it is."

"Good logic, Karla."

She came up to me. "Feel yourself - you're lucky you didn't get the killer flu. Your muscles are as rigid as a crowbar. You're making yourself sick thinking like this. Come on - I'll do your back. I'll talk you down from this."

As she plucked the knots from out of my body, removed the abandoned refrigerators and couches and sacks of garbage from underneath my skin, she talked in the way she does. She told me, "Bodies are like diskettes with tags. You click on to them and you can see the size and type of file immediately. On people, this labeling occurs on the face."

Prod, prod, rub, poke.

"If you know a lot about the world, that knowledge makes itself plain on your face. At first this can be a frightening thing to know, but you get used to it. Sometimes it can be off-putting. But I think it is only off-putting to people who are worried that they themselves are learning too much too quickly. Knowing too much about the world can make you unloving - and maybe unlovable. And your father's face is different now. He seems like a new man - different than when he first drove up to the old house in Redmond. However he may have changed, it's for the better. So don't lose sight of that."

Grudgingly: "All right."

If it weren't for Karla, sometimes I think I'd just implode.

FRIDAY, December 24,1993

Software fun: Work crawled to a standstill today as Bug shared anagram software that spits out all the combinations of words you can make with your name. Michael was mad, because we lost several combined people-hours doing it. Everyone's faxing and e-mailing their relatives and friends their name-as-anagram for Christmas tomorrow. It's the low-budget gift-giving solution.

Everybody's also downloading shareware and scuttling about the valley cobbling together melanges of bootleg software programs to give as presents. We're all broke!

It seems everybody's trying to find a word that expresses mare bigness than the mere word "supermodel" - hyper model - gigamodel - negamodel. Michael suggested that

our inability to come up with a word bigger than supermodel reflects our inability to deal with the crushing weight of history we've created for ourselves as a species.

We got off work early (7:00) to shop, but we all came back in around 10:00 and started working again, until around 1:00. Slaves, or what?

Around midnight, December 25, Susan grunted, "Uhhh, Merry Christmas." We all reciprocated, and then went back to work.

Christmas Day, 1993

We sat inside and opened prezzies over coffee. Outside it was Richie Cunningham weather - like from Happy Days when Ralph Malph and Potsie come over and ding the doorbell, and they're wearing their varsity coats and they say, "Hello, Mrs. C." and the weather outside is . . . simply weather.

But where is everybody's family? Why isn't everybody with their families! Nobody went home. Bug still can't face his parents in Idaho; Susan either (her mother is in Schaumberg, Illinois; her father is in Irvine, down south); Karla - not likely. Only Anatole went to visit his parents, and then only because they're three hours north in Santa Rosa.

Anyway, we're all so broke this year that we agreed not to buy anything expensive for anyone, and it was fun. Gag gifts. Christmas really brings out the geek in tech people:

• From Todd to Bug: a brown Wackenhut security baseball cap

• From Karla to me: the IBM PC version of The $100,000 Pyramid

• From me to Karla: a Hewlett-Packard calculator with jewels for buttons

• From Ethan to all of us: CandyCaller toy cellular phone filled with candies

• From Bug in all of our stockings: Dream Whip, nondairy whip topping

• From me to Karla: a Play-Doh fun factory insect-shaped insect extruding device ("Look-softer, less crumbly Play-Doh," she squealed.)

• From various people to various people: Ren & Stimpy screen-savers ("Screensavers are the macrame of the '90s," Susan boldly exclaimed.)

• From Susan to all of us: HANDMADE Martha-Stewart-y gift baskets, which made us all feel cheap. Michael asked her outright: "Susan, where did you find the discretionary time to assemble these?" She looked guilty, and then told Michael to piss off, and it was funny. Michael whispered to me: "Handmade presents are scary because they reveal that you have too much free time."

For some reason, everyone gave Susan premoistened towelette-related products. It's one of those jokes that went out of control the way sometimes things go out of control for no obvious reason. A spontaneous nonlinear event. She received:

• 124 klear screen™ premoistened towelettes, "with love from Dan and Karla" (I also mailed Abe a bottle of Spray-N-Clean so he can remove the nasal encrustations on his Mac screens)

• Celeste® sam-com 3205 premoistened towelettes specifically targeted for consumer electronics mouthpieces - from Ethan. (" 'Cleans and freshens communications

equipment.' I stole a wad of them from business class on United last year.")

• "Pocket Wetty" brand premoistened towelettes from Japan, made by Wakodo KK. (¥ 145, thank you, Anatole.)

Everybody gave Mom a rock for Christmas and she said they were the best presents she's ever had. Everybody tried to give her a really good rock. It's so weird - everyone genuinely tried to find a cool rock.

Todd made a joke about Charlie Brown trick-or-treating and getting a rock in his bag, and saying, "I got a rock," but Mom didn't catch the media reference.

Needless to say, there was much merchandise from Fry's:

• From me to Dad: a wall calendar with pictures of different model train sets for every month

• From Abe to Susan: Copy of Quicken, the oddly religious personal/financial software program that has no option for roommates or other non-Cold War era sex/space-sharing alliances.

• From Susan to Todd: SIMMs (Macintosh memory modules: Single Inline Memory Modules)

• From everyone to everyone: Video and audio cables

• From Michael to Dad: an old-fashioned red Craftsman tool chest

• From Santa to all of us in our stockings: diet Cokes, Hostess products, blank video tapes, and batteries!

Of course: minivan-loads of Star Trekiana -

• three British import CDs of William Shatner karaokeing "Mr. Tamborine Man" (famous career mistake #487) as well as "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds"

• Starlog magazine subscriptions

• bootleg galley proofs of the upcoming Gene Rodenberry biography

• Next Generation mouse pads

• photo glossies of Data, Riker, Deanna Troi, and Wesley from Star Trek: The Next Generation

• a plastic Starship Enterprise Control Center as well as a Franklin Mint Starship Enterprise replica

• a Deep Space Nine yo-yo, but no one has really clicked into Deep Space Nine yet, so it wasn't popular and sat on the coffee table

Overheard: "It got rated four-and-a-half mice by MacUser!"

Mom made a turkey for dinner, and wore pearls and hammed it up as a TV mom. We all ate together in the "formal" dining room. Christmas is traditionally a bigger deal in our house, but we all see each other so much, it was no big deal being together. We talked about Macs and product.

In the background the TV set was playing a Wheel of Fortune rerun, and was making a ding-ding-ding sound. Mom asked, "What's that noise," and Susan said, "Someone just bought a vowel."

Then the BIG surprise was that ABE appeared! Like something from a Disney movie, right in the middle of dinner, in a white rental car, laden with Sony products, bottles o' booze, and a big box with a spectacular bow on top for Bug - a paper shredder from a surplus store. Bug was positively sniffling with gratitude ("It's the nicest present anybody's ever given me!") He spent the rest of the afternoon wrapping newspapers and lighting flash bombs of the shredded remnants in the fireplace, ridding the Habitrail of several months and stratum of bedding material, and it looked quite presentable at the end of it.

After dinner we forced Abe into the van and drove him to 7-Eleven to buy him more Christmas presents, so he ended up with copies of People, microwaved cheeseburgers, Reese's Pieces, and string as gifts. I realized how much I liked Abe, but I wonder if I'd ever have recognized that if I had kept living in the group house. I think our e-mail correspondence has given us an intimacy that face-to-face contact never would have. Irony!

I almost made Dad a cardboard sign saying, "will manage for food" but then I felt like a bad, bad son, and then, like clockwork, I got to feeling depressed for fifty something's, imagining them standing at the corner of El Camino Real and Rengstorff Avenue holding up such a sign. And I can't believe Michael got Dad a nice tool kit for Christmas. How fucking thoughtful.

All family'ed out.

Karla and I drove down the hill to Syntex, birthplace of the birth control pill, a little bit below Mom and Dad's house, down on Hillview Avenue - a 1970s Utopian, Andromeda Strainishly empty tech complex. We sat in the grass amphitheater by the leafless birch trees, looked at the sculptures from the sculpture garden, walked over the walkways and pretended we were Susan Dey and Bobby Sherman on a date, falling through a dark cultural warp, and landing inside the technological dream that underwrote the free-wheelin', swingfest TV-lifestyle of that era.

Syntex was the first corporation to invent the "workplace as campus." Before California high-tech parks, the most a corporation ever did for an employee was maybe supply a house, maybe a car, maybe a doctor, and maybe a place to buy groceries. Beginning in the 1970s, corporations began supplying showers for people who jogged during lunch hour and sculptures lo soothe the working soul - proactive humanism - the first full-scale integration of the corporate realm into the private. In the 1980s, corporate integration punctured the next realm of corporate life invasion at "campuses" like Microsoft and Apple - with the next level of intrusion being that the borderline between work and life blurred to the point of unrecognizability.

Give us your entire life or we won't allow you to work on cool projects.

In the 1990s, corporations don't even hire people anymore. People become their own corporations. It was inevitable.

Karla and I felt like the last couple on earth, walking through the emptiness. We felt like Adam and Eve.

I told Karla that Ethan doesn't think biotech is such a hot investment because it's "too 9-to-5," and the workers follow non-techie time schedules, and their parking lots NEVER have cars in them on Sundays. Actually, to this day, Ethan is still trying to find a biotech firm with Sunday workers. He says that once he finds one, he'll be able to invest the farm, lie back, and retire. If only Ethan had something to invest!

Karla picked some iceplant flowers, the semiofficial plant of the high-tech world because it stabilizes hillsides so quickly. She said it's thornlessness makes it "the Play-Doh" version of cactus.

We were being very freestyle. We discussed whether we should go try and crash into the research institute off the 280 where Koko the gorilla lives with her kitten. Karla said that the transdermal nicotine patch was invented just over the hill, on Page Mill Road, near the Interval Research Corporation headquarters. History! Then Karla suggested we visit Interval Research's campus and see what it's like: "If Syntex was the 1970s and Apple was the 1980s, then Interval is the 1990s."

Interval Research's headquarters were like a middle-class honeymoon hotel in Maui circa 1976, and slightly gone to seed, with Gilligan's Island-style lagoonlets between the buildings and a lobby with a vaguely medical/dental, is-this-where-I-drop-off-my-urine-sample? feel.

And (important) there were CARS in the parking lot, even on the Sunday after Christmas.

Karla said she knew this girl Laura who worked there, and so we checked, and she was there. We rapped on her window, overlooking the central courtyard's lagoon, and she looked up and came out and let us in. Laura has an IQ of 800, just like Karla. She invited us inside and we played pool at their pool table. The pool table is to the 1990s what PARC's bean bag chairs were to the 1970s.

Interval Research is so weird because nobody knows for sure what it is they really do there. They have stealth cachet. Laura does something on neural nets.

People project onto Interval's blankness either their paranoia or their hope. People always get emotional when you mention it. Interval was the think tank-slash-company Paul Allen from Microsoft started when he learned he had something terminal. His disease left after he founded it.