Microserfs

Microserfs By Douglas Coupland

thanks:

John Batelle

Elizabeth Dunn

Ian Ferrell

James Glave

James Joaquin

Kevin Kelly

Jane Metcalfe

Judith Regan

Louis Rossetto

Nathan Shedroff

Michael Tchao

Ian Verchere

Formatter notice

• In the book, there are:

1) a page full of what looks like random characters;

2) two pages of nothing but ones and zeros;

3) two pages of more random-looking characters; and

4) several pages where one word is repeated over and over.

These have been mostly deleted and noted in the text. (See below for more about this.)

• I separated all the paragraphs with blank lines. Where there were section spaces (i.e. a space between paragraphs with the next paragraph beginning with a drop cap in the physical book), I put three asterisks (* * *) in front of the next section.

• The book employs many typographical techniques - different font sizes and weights and justification - that are impossible to duplicate in plain text. (The "best" ebook of this would probably have to be in PDF format. HTML would come close, but it'd take a lot of work.)

• Mispelled words in the emails between Dan and Abe are original text. (Didn't their email clients have spell checkers back in '93? Or would a true geek just turn it off?)

• The book is full of easter eggs - the random-looking pages mentioned above.

- The 1's and 0's on pages 104-105 decode to a poem.

- The random-looking text on pages 308-309 (consonants on page 308; vowels on page 309) are actually Patty Hearst's "ransom note" from the late 70's.

- I haven't confirmed this yet, but the random text on page 20 sure looks like something UUencoded.

For more about this, see a fan's web page about the book at:

http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/Gallery/5560/coupmicr.html

• I was thinking of putting hard CR/LF's at the end of each 72-character line in the text version. But, PC's, Macs, and Unices all use different EOL markers. So fergeddabout it. Straight PalmDOC to TXT conversion it is.

1 Microserfs

FRIDAY

Early Fall, 1993

This morning, just after 11:00, Michael locked himself in his office and he won't come out.

Bill (Bill!) sent Michael this totally wicked flame-mail from hell on the e-mail system - and he just wailed on a chunk of code Michael had written. Using the Bloom County-cartoons-taped-on-the-door index, Michael is certainly the most sensitive coder in Building Seven - not the type to take criticism easily. Exactly why Bill would choose Michael of all people to wail on is confusing.

We figured it must have been a random quality check to keep the troops in line. Bill's so smart.

Bill is wise.

Bill is kind.

Bill is benevolent.

Bill, Be My Friend . . . Please!

* * *

Actually, nobody on our floor has ever been flamed by Bill personally. The episode was tinged with glamour and we were somewhat jealous. I tried to tell Michael this, but he was crushed.

Shortly before lunch he stood like a lump outside my office. His skin was pale like rising bread dough, and his Toppy's cut was dripping sweat,

leaving little damp marks on the oyster-gray-with-plum highlights of the Microsoft carpeting. He handed me a printout of Bill's memo and then gallumphed into his office, where he's been burrowed ever since.

He won't answer his phone, respond to e-mail, or open his door. On his doorknob he placed a "Do Not Disturb" thingy stolen from the Boston Radisson during last year's Macworld Expo. Todd and I walked out onto the side lawn to try to peek in his window, but his Venetian blinds were closed and a gardener with a leaf blower chased us away with a spray of grass clippings.

They mow the lawn every ten minutes at Microsoft. It looks like green Lego pads.

* * *

Finally, at about 2:30 a.m., Todd and I got concerned about Michael's not eating, so we drove to the 24-hour Safeway in Bellevue. We went shopping for "flat" foods to slip underneath Michael's door.

The Safeway was completely empty save for us and a few other Microsoft people just like us - hair-trigger geeks in pursuit of just the right snack. Because of all the rich nerds living around here, Redmond and Bellevue are very "on-demand" neighborhoods. Nerds get what they want when they want it, and they go psycho if it's not immediately available. Nerds overfocus. I guess that's the problem. But it's precisely this ability to narrow-focus that makes them so good at code writing: one line at a time, one line in a strand of millions.

* * *

When we returned to Building Seven at 3:00 a.m., there were still a few people grinding away. Our group is scheduled to ship product (RTM: Release to Manufacturing) in just eleven days (Top Secret: We'll never make it).

Michael's office lights were on, but once again, when we knocked, he wouldn't answer his door. We heard his keyboard chatter, so we figured he was still alive. The situation really begged a discussion of Turing logic - could we have discerned that the entity behind the door was indeed even human? We slid Kraft singles, Premium Plus crackers, Pop-Tarts, grape leather, and Freezie-Pops in to him.